Automatic speech recognition and the transcription of indistinct forensic audio: how do the new generation of systems fare?

Abstract

This study provides an update on an earlier study in the “Capturing Talk” research topic, which aimed to demonstrate how automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems work with indistinct forensic-like audio, in comparison with good-quality audio. Since that time, there has been rapid technological advancement, with newer systems having access to extremely large language models and having their performance proclaimed as being human-like in accuracy. This study compares various ASR systems, including OpenAI’s Whisper, to continue to test how well automatic speaker recognition works with forensic-like audio. The results show that the transcription of a good-quality audio file is at ceiling for so..