Publication Data
Google's Cross-Dialect Arabic Voice Search
Abstract: We present a large scale effort to build a commercial
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) product for Arabic. Our goal is to support voice
search, dictation, and voice control for the general Arabic-speaking public, including
support for multiple Arabic dialects. We describe our ASR system design and compare
recognizers for five Arabic dialects, with the potential to reach more than 125 million
people in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We
compare systems built on diacritized vs. non-diacritized text. We also conduct
cross-dialect experiments, where we train on one dialect and test on the others. Our
average word error rate (WER) is 24.8% for voice search.
