Improving whispered speech recognition using pseudo-whispered based data augmentation

Whispering, characterized by its soft, breathy, and hushed qualities, serves as a distinct form of speech commonly employed for private communication and can also occur in cases of pathological speech. The acoustic characteristics of whispered speech differ substantially from normally phonated speech and the scarcity of adequate training data...

Bias Mitigation Against Non-native Speakers in Dutch ASR

One of the most important problems that needs tackling for wide deployment of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is the bias in ASR, i.e., ASRs tend to generate more accurate predictions for certain speaker groups while making more errors on speech from others. In this thesis, we aim to reduce bias against non-native speakers of Dutch compared...