# Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 411 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00015/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13979/) (2020)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04624/) (2021)
- [vq-wav2vec: Self-Supervised Learning of Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05453/) (2019)
- [YourTTS: Towards Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS and Zero-Shot Voice Conversion for everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02418/) (2021)
- [ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07857/) (2021)
- [Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01037/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 411)

- [SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07445/) (2023)
- [Spirit LM: Interleaved Spoken and Written Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05755/) (2024)
- [A Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Book](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16575/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Detection of LLMs-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15654/) (2023)
- [Natural language guidance of high-fidelity text-to-speech with synthetic annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01912/) (2024)
- [mHuBERT-147: A Compact Multilingual HuBERT Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06371/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14235/) (2023)
- [YODAS: Youtube-Oriented Dataset for Audio and Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00899/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00837/) (2024)
- [SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10118/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Discrete Speech Tokens: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06490/) (2025)
- [IndicVoices: Towards building an Inclusive Multilingual Speech Dataset for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01926/) (2024)
- [OWSM-CTC: An Open Encoder-Only Speech Foundation Model for Speech Recognition, Translation, and Language Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12654/) (2024)
- [LoRA-Whisper: Parameter-Efficient and Extensible Multilingual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06619/) (2024)
- [Can Whisper perform speech-based in-context learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07081/) (2023)
- [HierSpeech++: Bridging the Gap between Semantic and Acoustic Representation of Speech by Hierarchical Variational Inference for Zero-shot Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12454/) (2023)
- [GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11546/) (2024)
- [SALM-Duplex: Efficient and Direct Duplex Modeling for Speech-to-Speech Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15670/) (2025)
- [ML-SUPERB 2.0: Benchmarking Multilingual Speech Models Across Modeling Constraints, Languages, and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08641/) (2024)
- [OWSM v4: Improving Open Whisper-Style Speech Models via Data Scaling and Cleaning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00338/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Turn-taking Prediction Using Voice Activity Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06487/) (2024)
- [LongCat-Flash-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00279/) (2025)
- [OmniVoice: Towards Omnilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00688/) (2026)
- [Turning Whisper into Real-Time Transcription System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14743/) (2023)
- [Advocating Character Error Rate for Multilingual ASR Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07400/) (2024)
- [Speech Translation with Speech Foundation Models and Large Language Models: What is There and What is Missing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12025/) (2024)
- [Speech Robust Bench: A Robustness Benchmark For Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07937/) (2024)
- [HyperLLaVA: Dynamic Visual and Language Expert Tuning for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13447/) (2024)
- [Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04527/) (2024)
- [A Simple Baseline for Spoken Language to Sign Language Translation with 3D Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04730/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Expanding the language coverage of speech technology has the potential to improve access to information for many more people. However, current speech technology is restricted to about one hundred languages which is a small fraction of the over 7,000 languages spoken around the world. The Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project increases the number of supported languages by 10-40x, depending on the task. The main ingredients are a new dataset based on readings of publicly available religious texts and effectively leveraging self-supervised learning. We built pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models covering 1,406 languages, a single multilingual automatic speech recognition model for 1,107 languages, speech synthesis models for the same number of languages, as well as a language identification model for 4,017 languages. Experiments show that our multilingual speech recognition model more than halves the word error rate of Whisper on 54 languages of the FLEURS benchmark while being trained on a small fraction of the labeled data.