ZIPA: A family of efficient models for multilingual phone recognition

We present ZIPA, a family of efficient speech models that advances the state-of-the-art performance of crosslinguistic phone recognition.We first curated IPAPACK++, a large-scale multilingual speech corpus with 17,132 hours of normalized phone transcriptions and a novel evaluation set capturing unseen languages and sociophonetic variation.With the large-scale training data, ZIPA, including transducer (ZIPA-T) and CTC-based (ZIPA-CR) variants, leverage the efficient Zipformer backbones and outperform existing phone recognition systems with much fewer parameters.Further scaling via noisy student training on 11,000 hours of pseudo-labeled multilingual data yields further improvement.While ZIPA achieves strong performance on benchmarks, error analysis reveals persistent limitations in modeling sociophonetic diversity, underscoring challenges for future research.