# Speech ReaLLM -- Real-time Streaming Speech Recognition with Multimodal LLMs by Teaching the Flow of Time

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09569 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09569/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Pushing the Limits of Semi-Supervised Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10504/) (2020)
- [On decoder-only architecture for speech-to-text and large language model integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03917/) (2023)
- [Prompting Large Language Models with Speech Recognition Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11795/) (2023)
- [SeamlessM4T: Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11596/) (2023)
- [Emformer: Efficient Memory Transformer Based Acoustic Model For Low Latency Streaming Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10759/) (2020)
- [Monotonic Infinite Lookback Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05218/) (2019)
- [Online and Linear-Time Attention by Enforcing Monotonic Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00784/) (2017)
- [Monotonic Chunkwise Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05382/) (2017)
- [Efficient Monotonic Multihead Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04515/) (2023)
- [Streaming Transformer Transducer Based Speech Recognition Using Non-Causal Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05241/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LLaMA-Omni: Seamless Speech Interaction with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06666/) (2024)
- [Language Model Can Listen While Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02622/) (2024)
- [SocialMind: LLM-based Proactive AR Social Assistive System with Human-like Perception for In-situ Live Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04036/) (2024)
- [BESTOW: Efficient and Streamable Speech Language Model with the Best of Two Worlds in GPT and T5](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19954/) (2024)
- [Efficient Streaming LLM for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03752/) (2024)
- [Word Level Timestamp Generation for Automatic Speech Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15646/) (2025)
- [Uni-ASR: Unified LLM-Based Architecture for Non-Streaming and Streaming Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11123/) (2026)
- [Overcoming Non-monotonicity in Transducer-based Streaming Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17170/) (2024)
- [Transducer-Llama: Integrating LLMs into Streamable Transducer-based Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16464/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Contextual Speech Recognition Using Vector Quantization for Efficient Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00664/) (2024)
- [SimulS2S-LLM: Unlocking Simultaneous Inference of Speech LLMs for Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15509/) (2025)
- [From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04592/) (2026)
- [PAC: Pronunciation-Aware Contextualized Large Language Model-based Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12647/) (2025)
- [TRADE: Transducer-Augmented Decoder for Speech LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08486/) (2026)
- [Alignment-Path Distillation from Non-streaming ASR-LLMs for Streaming Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20121/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Speech ReaLLM, a new ASR architecture that marries "decoder-only" ASR with the RNN-T to make multimodal LLM architectures capable of real-time streaming. This is the first "decoder-only" ASR architecture designed to handle continuous audio without explicit end-pointing. Speech ReaLLM is a special case of the more general ReaLLM ("real-time LLM") approach, also introduced here for the first time. The idea is inspired by RNN-T: Instead of generating a response only at the end of a user prompt, generate after every input token received in real time (it is often empty). On Librispeech "test", an 80M Speech ReaLLM achieves WERs of 3.0% and 7.4% in real time (without an external LM or auxiliary loss). This is only slightly above a 3x larger Attention-Encoder-Decoder baseline. We also show that this way, an LLM architecture can learn to represent and reproduce the flow of time; and that a pre-trained 7B LLM can be fine-tuned to do reasonably well on this task.