# Adapting Foundation ASR Models to Dysarthric Speech: A Case Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31722 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31722/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Qwen3-ASR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21337/) (2026)
- [Very Deep Self-Attention Networks for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13377/) (2019)
- [Personalizing ASR for Dysarthric and Accented Speech with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13511/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Pre-trained ASR System Fine-tuning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition using Adversarial Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00662/) (2024)
- [Towards Inclusive ASR: Investigating Voice Conversion for Dysarthric Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14874/) (2025)
- [Improved Dysarthric Speech to Text Conversion via TTS Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06391/) (2025)

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

- [Choosing a PEFT Variant for Per-Patient Dysarthric ASR: A Single-Speaker Case Study on Two ASR Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02735/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often perform poorly in dysarthric speech, limiting their usefulness to affected speakers in everyday communication. This paper presents a personalized ASR system for a dysarthric speaker, built by adapting a foundation ASR model to speaker-specific data. Using the TEQST tool, we collected 92 hours of read speech and later added 8.8 hours of user corrections gathered through a deployed mobile application. Starting from Whisper, fine-tuning reduced word error rate to 15.8% with only 1.4 hours of adaptation data on the read test set, reached 10.7% / 16.1% with 22.5 hours on the read and corrections test sets, respectively, and achieved the best result of 9.7% when using all available data including the corrections on the read test set and 7.8% on the corrections test set. Using LoRA adaptation and/or Qwen3-ASR as foundation model performed worse in this setting. The results show that personalized fine-tuning can make foundation ASR models substantially more effective for dysarthric speech and suitable for practical deployment.