ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

Building an Accurate Open-Source Hebrew ASR System through Crowdsourcing

Yanir Marmor, Yair Lifshitz, Yoad Snapir, Kinneret Misgav

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Hebrew faces significant challenges due to limited resources and rich morphology. While recent advances have improved high-resource languages ASR, Hebrew still lacks robust open-source solutions. Through crowdsourcing efforts, we created a dataset of 314 hours of transcribed speech, which we used to train a new Hebrew ASR model based on the Whisper architecture. Our model demonstrates up to 29% reduction in error rates compared to existing Whisper solutions, particularly excelling in producing verbatim transcriptions. Additionally, we introduce a new evaluation dataset designed specifically for Hebrew ASR assessment. By making both the model and methodology freely available, we provide a framework that can be adapted for developing ASR systems in other under-resourced languages. This work represents a step toward making speech technology more accessible in different languages.