Of round 7,000 languages on the earth, a tiny fraction are supported by AI language fashions. NVIDIA is tackling the issue with a brand new dataset and fashions that assist the event of high-quality speech recognition and translation AI for 25 European languages — together with languages with restricted out there knowledge like Croatian, Estonian and Maltese.
These instruments will allow builders to extra simply scale AI purposes to assist international customers with quick, correct speech know-how for production-scale use instances similar to multilingual chatbots, customer support voice brokers and near-real-time translation companies. They embrace:
- Granary, a large, open-source corpus of multilingual speech datasets that accommodates round 1,000,000 hours of audio, together with almost 650,000 hours for speech recognition and over 350,000 hours for speech translation.
- NVIDIA Canary-1b-v2, a billion-parameter mannequin skilled on Granary for high-quality transcription of European languages, plus translation between English and two dozen supported languages.
- NVIDIA Parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3, a streamlined, 600-million-parameter mannequin designed for real-time or large-volume transcription of Granary’s supported languages.
The paper behind Granary will probably be offered at Interspeech, a language processing convention happening within the Netherlands, Aug. 17-21. The dataset, in addition to the brand new Canary and Parakeet fashions, are actually out there on Hugging Face.
How Granary Addresses Knowledge Shortage
To develop the Granary dataset, the NVIDIA speech AI crew collaborated with researchers from Carnegie Mellon College and Fondazione Bruno Kessler. The crew handed unlabeled audio by an modern processing pipeline powered by NVIDIA NeMo Speech Knowledge Processor toolkit that turned it into structured, high-quality knowledge.
This pipeline allowed the researchers to reinforce public speech knowledge right into a usable format for AI coaching, with out the necessity for resource-intensive human annotation. It’s out there in open supply on GitHub.
With Granary’s clear, ready-to-use knowledge, builders can get a head begin constructing fashions that sort out transcription and translation duties in almost all the European Union’s 24 official languages, plus Russian and Ukrainian.
For European languages underrepresented in human-annotated datasets, Granary offers a crucial useful resource to develop extra inclusive speech applied sciences that higher replicate the linguistic variety of the continent — all whereas utilizing much less coaching knowledge.
The crew demonstrated of their Interspeech paper that, in comparison with different common datasets, it takes round half as a lot Granary coaching knowledge to realize a goal accuracy degree for computerized speech recognition (ASR) and computerized speech translation (AST).
Tapping NVIDIA NeMo to Turbocharge Transcription
The brand new Canary and Parakeet fashions supply examples of the sorts of fashions builders can construct with Granary, custom-made to their goal purposes. Canary-1b-v2 is optimized for accuracy on advanced duties, whereas parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 is designed for high-speed, low-latency duties.
By sharing the methodology behind the Granary dataset and these two fashions, NVIDIA is enabling the worldwide speech AI developer neighborhood to adapt this knowledge processing workflow to different ASR or AST fashions or further languages, accelerating speech AI innovation.
Canary-1b-v2, out there beneath a permissive license, expands the Canary household’s supported languages from 4 to 25. It presents transcription and translation high quality corresponding to fashions 3x bigger whereas working inference as much as 10x quicker.
NVIDIA NeMo, a modular software program suite for managing the AI agent lifecycle, accelerated speech AI mannequin improvement. NeMo Curator, a part of the software program suite, enabled the crew to filter out artificial examples from the supply knowledge in order that solely high-quality samples had been used for mannequin coaching. The crew additionally harnessed the NeMo Speech Knowledge Processor toolkit for duties like aligning transcripts with audio information and changing knowledge into the required codecs.
Parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 prioritizes excessive throughput and is able to transcribing 24-minute audio segments in a single inference cross. The mannequin robotically detects the enter audio language and transcribes with out further prompting steps.
Each Canary and Parakeet fashions present correct punctuation, capitalization and word-level timestamps of their outputs.
Learn extra on GitHub and get began with Granary on Hugging Face.
