Robust speech recognition in 70+ Languages 

Hi all,
We are scaling multi-lingual speech recognition systems - come join us for the robust speech community event from Jan 24th to Feb 7th. With compute provided by OVHcould, we are going from 50 to 70+ languages, from 300M to 2B parameters models, and from toy evaluation datasets to real-world audio evaluation.

What it is about 

The goal of the event is to provide robust speech recognition systems in as many languages as possible to the community. We hope that especially low-resource languages will profit from this event.
The main components of the speech recognition event consist of:

Meta AI’s state-of-the-art XLS-R model 175
Common Voice newest datasets 7 & 8 141
Language model boosted decoding with Wav2Vec2 123
Real-world audio for evaluation


How does it work 

Participants have two weeks to build as many robust speech recognition systems in as many languages as they want. In general, speech recognition systems can consist of:

Fine-tuned speech recognition checkpoints (e.g. XLS-R)
Language model boosted decoders (e.g. pyctcdecode + n-gram)
Pre- and post-processing modules, such as noise-canceling, spelling correction, …

During the event, you will have the opportunity to work on each of these components to build speech recognition systems in your favorite language!
Each speech recognition system will automatically be evaluated on real-world audio (if available for the language). After the fine-tuning week, the best-performing systems of each language will receive  SWAG.

What do I need to do to participate 

To participate, simply fill out this short google form 391. You will also need to create a Hugging Face Hub account here 38 and join our discord here 155 - when joining the event’s discord channel please make sure to click on the  emoji under the first message to access all relevant information. OVHcloud 44 kindly offered to provide a limited about of GPUs for participants if needed - if you would like to have access to a GPU, please join the discord for more information*. Here 25 are a some in-detail videos on how to get started with setting up an OVHcloud account.
This fine-tuning week should be especially interesting to native speakers of low-resource languages. Your language skills will help you select the best training data, and possibly build the best existing speech recognition system in your language.
More in-detail information will be announced in the discord channel. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

What do I get 


enjoy a bit of Hugging Face vibe
learn how to build state-of-the-art speech recognition systems
free compute to build a powerful fine-tuned model under your name on the Hub
hugging face SWAG if you manage to have the best performing model in a language
100 GPU hours from OVHcloud 44 if you manage to have the best performing model in a language

Open-sourcely yours,
Anton, Omar, Nico & Patrick