# Domain-Adaptive ASR for Telephony AI Agents: Fine-tuning Canary Flash Models for Enterprise Contact Center Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24916/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2026.

## 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)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [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)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Listen, Attend and Spell](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01211/) (2015)
- [Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02595/) (2015)
- [NeMo: a toolkit for building AI applications using Neural Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09577/) (2019)
- [Fast Conformer with Linearly Scalable Attention for Efficient Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05084/) (2023)
- [Open ASR Leaderboard: Towards Reproducible and Transparent Multilingual and Long-Form Speech Recognition Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06961/) (2025)
- [Thai Wav2Vec2.0 with CommonVoice V8](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04799/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This technical report describes Botnoi Group's methodology and results for rapidly fine-tuning the open-source NVIDIA Canary 180M Flash and NVIDIA Canary 1B Flash multitask models for speech-to-text tasks using the NVIDIA NeMo framework, with a focus on telephony-grade audio. To support this adaptation, we construct a telephony-oriented fine-tuning dataset from live voicebot system recordings and prompted speech with telephony-oriented augmentation. We evaluate four targeted experiments-language adaptation (Thai), telephony robustness, domain-specific jargon (names and addresses), and latency-using character error rate (CER) for accuracy and real-time factor (RTFx) for inference speed. Results show that fine-tuning substantially improves recognition in noisy telephony environments, reducing CER from 23.31% to 9.04% on BOTNOI telephony data, and further improves business-critical names and addresses from 16.98% to 3.78% CER through domain-specific adaptation. Overall, our results show that domain-adaptive fine-tuning enhances business-critical terminology while preserving real-time responsiveness for production voicebot deployments.