mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Kid-Whisper: Towards Bridging the Performance Gap in Automatic Speech Recognition for Children VS. Adults

arXiv 2309.07927 ↗First posted 12 Sep 2023eess.AS cs.CL cs.SDcited by 26

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Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, exemplified by Whisper, have demonstrated the potential of these systems to approach human-level performance given sufficient data. However, this progress doesn't readily extend to ASR for children due to the limited availability of suitable child-specific databases and the distinct characteristics of children's speech. A recent study investigated leveraging the My Science Tutor (MyST) children's speech corpus to enhance Whisper's performance in recognizing children's speech. They were able to demonstrate some improvement on a limited testset. This paper builds on these findings by enhancing the utility of the MyST dataset through more efficient data preprocessing. We reduce the Word Error Rate (WER) on the MyST testset 13.93% to 9.11% with Whisper-Small and from 13.23% to 8.61% with Whisper-Medium and show that this improvement can be generalized to unseen datasets. We also highlight important challenges towards improving children's ASR performance. The results showcase the viable and efficient integration of Whisper for effective children's speech recognition.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 8 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2023.

Builds on

8 of 25 references.

References · 8

  1. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 3,972
  2. 2021XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scalecited by 589
  3. 2023Whisper-AT: Noise-Robust Automatic Speech Recognizers are Also Strong General Audio Event Taggerscited by 72
  4. 2020Applying Wav2vec2.0 to Speech Recognition in Various Low-resource Languagescited by 30
  5. 2023Adaptation of Whisper models to child speech recognitioncited by 25
  6. 2023N-Shot Benchmarking of Whisper on Diverse Arabic Speech Recognitioncited by 20
  7. 2022A Wav2vec2-Based Experimental Study on Self-Supervised Learning Methods to Improve Child Speech Recognitioncited by 15
  8. 2021Fundamental Frequency Feature Normalization and Data Augmentation for Child Speech Recognitioncited by 9

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 7; 2025: 10; 2026: 9.

26 papers.

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  1. 2024Benchmarking Children's ASR with Supervised and Self-supervised Speech Foundation Modelscited by 29
  2. 2024CPT-Boosted Wav2vec2.0: Towards Noise Robust Speech Recognition for Classroom Environmentscited by 7
  3. 2025Benchmarking Training Paradigms, Dataset Composition, and Model Scaling for Child ASR in ESPnetcited by 6
  4. 2025Selective Attention Merging for low resource tasks: A case study of Child ASRcited by 5
  5. 2025TICL+: A Case Study On Speech In-Context Learning for Children's Speech Recognitioncited by 4
  6. 2024Children's Speech Recognition through Discrete Token Enhancementcited by 3
  7. 2024FASA: a Flexible and Automatic Speech Aligner for Extracting High-quality Aligned Children Speech Datacited by 3
  8. 2024Automatic Screening for Children with Speech Disorder using Automatic Speech Recognition: Opportunities and Challengescited by 3
  9. 2025SSVD: Structured SVD for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and Benchmarking under Domain Shift in ASRcited by 3
  10. 2026Mind the Shift: Using Delta SSL Embeddings to Enhance Child ASRcited by 3
  11. 2025SingaKids: A Multilingual Multimodal Dialogic Tutor for Language Learningcited by 2
  12. 2024Evaluation of Speech Foundation Models for ASR on Child-Adult Conversations in Autism Diagnostic Sessionscited by 1
14 more
  1. 2025CO-VADA: A Confidence-Oriented Voice Augmentation Debiasing Approach for Fair Speech Emotion Recognitioncited by 1
  2. 2025SimClass: A Classroom Speech Dataset Generated via Game Engine Simulation For Automatic Speech Recognition Researchcited by 1
  3. 2026SSVD-O: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Structured SVD for Speech Recognitioncited by 1
  4. 2026Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domainscited by 1
  5. 2024Examining Test-Time Adaptation for Personalized Child Speech Recognitioncited by 0
  6. 2025From Weak Labels to Strong Results: Utilizing 5,000 Hours of Noisy Classroom Transcripts with Minimal Accurate Datacited by 0
  7. 2025RealClass: A Framework for Classroom Speech Simulation with Public Datasets and Game Enginescited by 0
  8. 2025KidSpeak: A General Multi-purpose LLM for Kids' Speech Recognition and Screeningcited by 0
  9. 2026InterventionLens: A Multi-Agent Framework for Detecting ASD Intervention Strategies in Parent-Child Shared Readingcited by 0
  10. 2026Abjad-Kids: An Arabic Speech Classification Dataset for Primary Educationcited by 0
  11. 2026Digital Harf: A Clinically Integrated Multimodal AI System for Pervasive Arabic Speech and Language Therapycited by 0
  12. 2026Encoder Awakening via Adapters: Effective Domain-Adaptive Fine-tuning of Speech-LLMscited by 0
  13. 2026AURA: Uncertainty-Routed Activation Editing for Acoustic Grounding in Speech Foundation Modelscited by 0
  14. 2026Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-LLMscited by 0