Afrispeech-Dialog: A Benchmark Dataset for Spontaneous English Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond

Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark dataset of 50 simulated medical and non-medical African-accented English conversations, designed to evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and related technologies. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) speaker diarization and ASR systems on long-form, accented speech, comparing their performance with native accents and discover a 10%+ performance degradation. Additionally, we explore medical conversation summarization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to demonstrate the impact of ASR errors on downstream medical summaries, providing insights into the challenges and opportunities for speech technologies in the Global South. Our work highlights the need for more inclusive datasets to advance conversational AI in low-resource settings.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted Cross-Layer Authentication for Secure and Efficient Vehicular Communications

Intelligent transportation systems increasingly depend on wireless communication, facilitating real-time vehicular communication. In this context, message authentication is crucial for establishing secure and reliable communication. However, security solutions must consider the dynamic nature of vehicular communication links, which fluctuate between line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS). In this paper, we propose a lightweight cross-layer authentication scheme that employs public-key infrastructure-based authentication for initial legitimacy detection while using keyed-based physical-layer re-authentication for message verification. However, the latter's detection probability (P_d) decreases with the reduction of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, we examine using Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) to enhance the SNR value directed toward the designated vehicle and consequently improve the P_d, especially for NLoS scenarios. We conducted theoretical analysis and practical implementation of the proposed scheme using a 1-bit RIS, consisting of 64 x 64 reflective units. Experimental results show a significant improvement in the P_d, increasing from 0.82 to 0.96 at SNR = - 6 dB for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system with 128 subcarriers. We also conducted informal and formal security analyses, using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN)-logic, to prove the scheme's ability to resist passive and active attacks. Finally, the computation and communication comparisons demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme compared to traditional crypto-based methods.