Over the last few days, I have been fine-tuning Nvidia Parakeet for Basque, and I have published the result here. The goal was simple: to have a lightweight Basque speech-to-text model that runs fast and is practical on modest hardware. Accuracy vs speed To be clear, this model is not as accurate as my best Basque Whisper model: xezpeleta/whisper-large-v3-eu However, it has a major advantage: it is very fast and can run on CPU-only setups. ...
In international conferences and events, it is increasingly common to have automatic real-time transcriptions available during live presentations. These technologies are very valuable as accessibility measures. Not only for people with hearing problems or cognitive difficulties but also for those who do not fully master the language. Is something like this possible in Basque? So far, the examples I’ve seen are in English. Taking advantage of the fact that I recently published new Whisper models for Basque, I decided to conduct a small experiment. Using a small and lightweight model like whisper-tiny-eu, would we be able to create automatic real-time transcriptions in Basque? ...
Speech-to-text (STT) technology converts spoken language into written text using natural language processing. These systems are becoming increasingly important in digital interfaces, accessibility solutions, and various communication platforms. Since 2022, I’ve been fine-tuning the original Whisper speech recognition model for the Basque language, using the Mozilla Common Voice dataset. Compared to the original models, I’ve seen significant improvements in performance. As the Mozilla Common Voice initiative has grown, the model’s accuracy has continued to improve. ...