# Less is More: Accurate Speech Recognition & Translation without Web-Scale Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19674/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [Seamless: Multilingual Expressive and Streaming Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05187/) (2023)
- [CoVoST 2 and Massively Multilingual Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10310/) (2020)
- [OWSM v3.1: Better and Faster Open Whisper-Style Speech Models based on E-Branchformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16658/) (2024)
- [Earnings-21: A Practical Benchmark for ASR in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11348/) (2021)
- [Earnings-22: A Practical Benchmark for Accents in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15591/) (2022)
- [Lhotse: a speech data representation library for the modern deep learning ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12561/) (2021)
- [Investigating End-to-End ASR Architectures for Long Form Audio Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09950/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in speech recognition and translation rely on hundreds of thousands of hours of Internet speech data. We argue that state-of-the art accuracy can be reached without relying on web-scale data. Canary - multilingual ASR and speech translation model, outperforms current state-of-the-art models - Whisper, OWSM, and Seamless-M4T on English, French, Spanish, and German languages, while being trained on an order of magnitude less data than these models. Three key factors enables such data-efficient model: (1) a FastConformer-based attention encoder-decoder architecture (2) training on synthetic data generated with machine translation and (3) advanced training techniques: data-balancing, dynamic data blending, dynamic bucketing and noise-robust fine-tuning. The model, weights, and training code will be open-sourced.