[albertzeyer]

Ah, but that sounds like a very inefficient approach, which probably still has quite high latency, and probably also performs bad in terms of word-error-rate (WER).

But I'm happy to be proven wrong. That's why I would like to see some actual numbers. Maybe it's still okish enough, maybe it's actually really bad. I'm curious. But I don't just want to see a demo or a sloppy statement like "it's working ok".

Note that this is a highly non-trivial problem, to make a streamable speech recognition system with low latency and still good performance. There is a big research community working on just this problem.

I actually have worked on this problem myself. E.g. see our work "Chunked Attention-based Encoder-Decoder Model for Streaming Speech Recognition" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08436), which will be presented at ICASSP 2024. E.g. for a median latency of 1.11s ec, we get a WER of 7.5% on TEDLIUM-v2 dev, which is almost as good as the offline model with 7.4% WER. This is a very good result (only very minor WER degradation). Or with a latency of 0.78 sec, we get 7.7% WER. Our model currently does not work too well when we go to even lower latencies (or the computational overhead becomes impractical).

Or see Emformer (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10759) as another popular model.

[huac]

whisper is simply not designed for this, in many ways, and it's impressive engineering to try and overcome its limitations, but I can't help but feel that it is easier to just use an architecture that is designed for the problem.

I was impressed by Kaldi's models for streaming ASR: https://k2-fsa.github.io/sherpa/onnx/pretrained_models/index... ; I suspect that the Nvidia/Suno Parakeet models will also be pretty good for streaming https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-ctc-0.6b

[Oranguru]

Very interesting. Thanks for the references. Have you released the code or pre-trained models yet or do you plan to do so at some point?

[albertzeyer]

The code is all released already. You find it here: https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn-experiments/tree/master/2...

This is TensorFlow-based. But I also have another PyTorch-based implementation already, also public (inside our other repo, i6_experiments). It's not so easy currently to set this up, but I'm working on a simpler pipeline in PyTorch.

We don't have the models online yet, but we can upload them later. But I'm not sure how useful they are outside of research, as they are specifically for those research tasks (Librispeech, Tedlium), and probably don't perform too well on other data.