BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language — Paper

Abstract

-cross Abstract: We present BaltiVoice, a 16.8-hour read-speech corpus for Balti (ISO 639-3: bft), a Tibetic language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with no prior publicly available ASR resources. The corpus contains 10,060 validated utterances in native Nastaliq script, derived from Mozilla Common Voice recordings. Fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper-small yields a Word Error Rate (WER) of 24.78% and a Character Error Rate (CER) of 8.30% after training for 5 epochs (3,000 steps) on the 538-utterance speaker-disjoint validation set, down from a zero-shot baseline of 159.19% WER and 152.52% CER. A Whisper-base fine-tuned on the same data achieves 44.54% WER and 15.61% CER, confirming that model capacity matters for this low-resource setting. The dataset, fine-tuned model, and a live transcription demo are publicly available on HuggingFace.

Authors 1

Muhammad Ali

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Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2606.03504
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2606.03504
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2606.03504
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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Authors: Muhammad Ali

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.CL, cs.AI	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperBaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language
New paper: BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language
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arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.AI	feed	T1· Official	2 h ago	1

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