# TeleASR-Amharic: A Benchmark for Robust Amharic ASR in Realistic Telecommunication Conditions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.26448/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 19 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multilingual and low-resource ASR, one of 11 directions in Speech and audio language models.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Speech and audio language models / [Multilingual and low-resource ASR](https://mlsanity.com/speech/multilingual-and-low-resource-asr/)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The real-world usability of ASR models remains challenging, particularly for low-resource languages, where existing speech resources are often collected in clean studio environments. In this work, we introduce TeleASR-Amharic, a benchmark for evaluating Amharic ASR under various acoustic and telecommunication conditions. We analyze the major degradations observed in real telecommunications recordings and develop a benchmark that covers multiple channel conditions, environmental disturbances, and telecom-domain variations. Our results show that telecommunication degradation can substantially reduce recognition performance, making even high-performing ASR models impractical under severe conditions. For example, the WER of the best-performing model increases from 0.23 to 0.79 under severe telecommunication degradation, corresponding to a relative increase of 243% in recognition errors. We further investigate the effects of different noise and channel distortions and show that scaling training data and applying carefully designed telecommunication-aware augmentation substantially improve robustness. In particular, our best training configuration achieves a 23.6% relative WER reduction under extreme noise conditions. Together with the release of our telecommunications-domain data, these findings provide a reproducible benchmark for measuring progress in Amharic ASR while highlighting open challenges in developing robust speech technologies for real-world deployment.