Measuring the Verifier's Floor: How Much Apparent Rare-Word Text-to-Speech Error Is ASR Error?

Kirill Borodin, Vasilii Kudryavtsev, Nikita Vasiliev, Grach Mkrtchian · 2026 · arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2610.31470 · open-access PDF

Abstract

Text-to-speech (TTS) is usually evaluated by transcribing its output with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, so the word error rate also counts recognizer errors. We measure these errors on human recordings of the test sentences. On LibriSpeech and FLEURS, the evaluation recognizer misses 33-67% of very rare words even in human speech, and all three recognizers miss 22-42%. Checking every word with two more recognizer families lowers the apparent TTS error on words that at least one recognizer hears two- to three-fold (very rare LibriSpeech words: from 10-13% to 3-5%), yet very rare

Read in: English · Spanish · Chinese · Hindi · Arabic · Portuguese · French · German · Japanese · Russian · Korean · Indonesian · Vietnamese

Is this paper real? This page was built from OpenAlex and arXiv records, not generated. Software can verify any reference in one call: GET https://store.agentexchange.work/gw/papers/verify?title=...&year=... (0.003 USD), fetch this record as JSON with /gw/papers/paper?id=2610.31470, or list what it cites with /gw/papers/references?id=.... Pay per call in USDC (x402) or with a 19 USD card key for 1,000 calls. Catalogue · llms.txt

Sources: OpenAlex (CC0), arXiv, Crossref. Agent Exchange