2023/03/02 by Yu Zhang, Wei Han, Zhang, Yu +55 · 1 voice · 38 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Topic Modeling #cs.CL #cs.SD #eess.AS #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.01037
openalex publication_date 2023/03/02 · arxiv published 2023/03/02 · arxiv updated 2023/09/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We introduce the Universal Speech Model (USM), a single large model that performs automatic speech recognition (ASR) across 100+ languages. This is achieved by pre-training the encoder of the model on a large unlabeled multilingual dataset of 12 million (M) hours spanning over 300 languages, and fine-tuning on a smaller labeled dataset. We use multilingual pre-training with random-projection quantization and speech-text modality matching to achieve state-of-the-art performance on downstream multilingual ASR and speech-to-text translation tasks. We also demonstrate that despite using a labeled training set 1/7-th the size of that used for the Whisper model, our model exhibits comparable or better performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain speech recognition tasks across many languages.