# Speechless: Speech Instruction Training Without Speech for Low Resource Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17417 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17417/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Length-Controlled AlpacaEval: A Simple Way to Debias Automatic Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04475/) (2024)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05889/) (2017)
- [SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13289/) (2023)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17196/) (2024)
- [SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07205/) (2021)
- [LLaMA-Omni: Seamless Speech Interaction with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06666/) (2024)
- [Tango 2: Aligning Diffusion-based Text-to-Audio Generations through Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09956/) (2024)
- [WavChat: A Survey of Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13577/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03751/) (2024)
- [BLSP: Bootstrapping Language-Speech Pre-training via Behavior Alignment of Continuation Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00916/) (2023)
- [Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02678/) (2024)
- [SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12072/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-Modal Alignment of Speech and Text Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07467/) (2018)
- [COSMIC: Data Efficient Instruction-tuning For Speech In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02248/) (2023)
- [Low-Resource Multilingual and Zero-Shot Multispeaker TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12223/) (2022)
- [LibriTTS-P: A Corpus with Speaking Style and Speaker Identity Prompts for Text-to-Speech and Style Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07969/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Low-Resource Language and Instruction Following Capabilities of Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10999/) (2024)
- [Instruction Data Generation and Unsupervised Adaptation for Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12946/) (2024)
- [Ichigo: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Realtime Voice Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15316/) (2024)
- [An Analysis of Semantically-Aligned Speech-Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01235/) (2022)
- [ASTRA: Aligning Speech and Text Representations for Asr without Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06664/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [TESU-LLM: Training Speech-LLMs Without Speech via Unified Encoder Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06343/) (2025)
- [Explainable Disentanglement on Discrete Speech Representations for Noise-Robust ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25150/) (2025)
- [Joint Speech and Text Training for LLM-Based End-to-End Spoken Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22503/) (2025)
- [Language-Aware Distillation for Multilingual Instruction-Following Speech LLMs with ASR-Only Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07025/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid growth of voice assistants powered by large language models (LLM) has highlighted a need for speech instruction data to train these systems. Despite the abundance of speech recognition data, there is a notable scarcity of speech instruction data, which is essential for fine-tuning models to understand and execute spoken commands. Generating high-quality synthetic speech requires a good text-to-speech (TTS) model, which may not be available to low resource languages. Our novel approach addresses this challenge by halting synthesis at the semantic representation level, bypassing the need for TTS. We achieve this by aligning synthetic semantic representations with the pre-trained Whisper encoder, enabling an LLM to be fine-tuned on text instructions while maintaining the ability to understand spoken instructions during inference. This simplified training process is a promising approach to building voice assistant for low-resource languages.