Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages

Authors: Yu Zhang, Wei Han, James Qin, Yongqiang Wang, Ankur Bapna, Zhehuai Chen, Nanxin Chen, Bo Li, Vera Axelrod, Gary Wang, Zhong Meng, Ke Hu, Andrew Rosenberg, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Daniel S. Park, Parisa Haghani, Jason Riesa, Ginger Perng, Hagen Soltau, Trevor Strohman, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Tara Sainath, Pedro Moreno, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Johan Schalkwyk, Françoise Beaufays, Yonghui Wu

20 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables

Abstract: 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.

Submitted to arXiv on 02 Mar. 2023

Explore the paper tree

Click on the tree nodes to be redirected to a given paper and access their summaries and virtual assistant

Also access our AI generated Summaries, or ask questions about this paper to our AI assistant.

Look for similar papers (in beta version)

By clicking on the button above, our algorithm will scan all papers in our database to find the closest based on the contents of the full papers and not just on metadata. Please note that it only works for papers that we have generated summaries for and you can rerun it from time to time to get a more accurate result while our database grows.