What happened
IISc’s SPIRE Lab, working with ARTPARK and Google, released SraVaani, described as the first multilingual Indian speech recognition model trained on 65 Indian languages and dialects. The release focuses on expanding speech-to-text capabilities beyond the set of languages that most existing speech recognition systems support officially.
Key details reported in the release include:
Coverage: SraVaani is reported to include 20 scheduled languages and 45 regional languages and dialects, for a total of 65.Accessibility: SraVaani is openly available on Hugging Face.Licence: The model is shared under an MIT licence.Design goal: The model is designed to provide speech-to-text for underserved languages—languages that often get weaker support from dominant-language speech AI.
The release also reports evaluation performance against a next-best system for at least one language pair:
Garo word error rate: 9.5% for SraVaani versus 69.4% for the next-best system (as reported in the release’s evaluation highlights).
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