# WEST: LLM based Speech Toolkit for Speech Understanding, Generation, and Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19902 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19902/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01318/) (2023)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02954/) (2024)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [AISHELL-1: An Open-Source Mandarin Speech Corpus and A Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05522/) (2017)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Paraformer: Fast and Accurate Parallel Transformer for Non-autoregressive End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08317/) (2022)
- [Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00774/) (2024)
- [AISHELL-2: Transforming Mandarin ASR Research Into Industrial Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10583/) (2018)
- [WeNet: Production oriented Streaming and Non-streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01547/) (2021)
- [FunAudioLLM: Voice Understanding and Generation Foundation Models for Natural Interaction Between Humans and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04051/) (2024)
- [Wespeaker: A Research and Production oriented Speaker Embedding Learning Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17016/) (2022)
- [An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for LLM with Strong ASR Capacity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08846/) (2024)
- [Step-Audio: Unified Understanding and Generation in Intelligent Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11946/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [G-STAR: End-to-End Global Speaker-Tracking Attributed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10468/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present WEST(WE Speech Toolkit), a speech toolkit based on a large language model (LLM) for speech understanding, generation, and interaction. There are three key features of WEST: 1) Fully LLM-based: Standing on the shoulders of giants by reusing mature architectures, ecosystems (e.g., Hugging Face), and methods (e.g., sequence packing) from large models. 2) Full-stack: Supports tasks such as recognition, synthesis, understanding, dialogue, and multimodal capabilities, with extensibility to incorporate open-source models. 3) Simple and Stupid: A simple and stupid speech toolkit that everyone can Touch. In addition, WEST provides two types of recipes, models, and experimental results. The first is entirely based on open-source models and open-source data, allowing users to fully reproduce the experiments in this paper and serving as a verification system or minimal system baseline. The second is trained on massive data, offering superior performance so the user can directly apply it out of the box. WEST is publicly avilable at https://github.com/wenet-e2e/west/