Evaluation of Lithuanian Speech-to-Text Transcribers

For more than two decades, Lithuanian speech recognition has been researched solely in Lithuania due to the need for deep knowledge of Lithuanian. AI advancements now allow high-quality speech-to-text systems to be built without native knowledge, given sufficient annotated data is available. This study evaluated as many as 18 Lithuanian speech transcribers using a small piece of recording; 7 best ones were selected and evaluated using extensive data. The top system achieved a WER of 5.1% for Lithuanian words, with three others showing 8.7–9.2%. For other word-size tokens, such as numbers, speech disfluencies, abbreviations, foreign words, a classification adapted to the Lithuanian language was proposed. Different processing strategies for tokens of these classes were examined and it was assessed which transcribers tend to follow which strategies.