[darkpuma]

> But as others have mentioned, there are several problems with audiobooks as an ASR training dataset. First, the language used in literature is often very different from how people actually speak,

The problem with the 'problem' you're describing is the scope of speech recognition is being defined too narrowly.

If all you care about is creating an open source Alexa/Siri knockoff, then yes you need to recognize conversational speech and much else. But what if you do want to recognize scripted rehearsed speech? What if you want a speech recognizer that can auto-transcribe movies, news broadcasts, or in fact audio books? Wouldn't it be nice if all audiobooks came with aligned text? That's an experience you can get right now with kindle/audible, but as far as I'm aware no FOSS ebook reading software supports it. If I have a public domain reading of Tom Sawyer from LibreVox and a text copy of Tom Sawyer from Project Gutenberg, how many hoops do I currently have to jump through to get the speech highlighted on my screen as the audiobook plays?

Recognizing all forms of speech should be the goal, not just one narrow albeit trendy sliver of speech.