WorldSpeech: A Multilingual Speech Corpus from Around the World

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09167v1
• Date: Sat, 09 May 2026 21:00:01 GMT
• Title: WorldSpeech: A Multilingual Speech Corpus from Around the World
• Abstract summary: WorldSpeech is a 24 kHz multilingual speech corpus comprising 65k hours of aligned audio-transcript data across 76 languages.<n>For 37 languages, WorldSpeech provides more than 200 hours of aligned speech, with 28 exceeding 500 hours and 24 surpassing 1k hours.<n>Fine-tuning existing ASR models on WorldSpeech results in an average relative Word-Error-Rate reduction of 63.5% across 11 typologically diverse languages.
• Score: 35.61634772862795
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performs well for high-resource languages with abundant paired audio-transcript data, but its accuracy degrades sharply for most languages due to limited publicly available aligned data. To this end, we introduce WorldSpeech, a 24 kHz multilingual speech corpus comprising 65k hours of aligned audio-transcript data across 76 languages, collected from diverse public sources including parliamentary proceedings, international broadcasts, and public-domain audiobooks. For 37 languages, WorldSpeech provides more than 200 hours of aligned speech, with 28 exceeding 500 hours and 24 surpassing 1k hours. Fine-tuning existing ASR models on WorldSpeech results in an average relative Word-Error-Rate reduction of 63.5% across 11 typologically diverse languages.

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