BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language

Abstract:We present BaltiVoice, a 16.8-hour read-speech corpus for Balti (ISO 639-3: bft), a Tibetic language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with no prior publicly available ASR resources. The corpus contains 10,060 validated utterances in native Nastaliq script, derived from Mozilla Common Voice recordings. Fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper-small yields a Word Error Rate (WER) of 26.74% and a Character Error Rate (CER) of 8.67% on a 538-utterance speaker-disjoint validation set, down from a zero-shot baseline of 159.19% WER and 152.52% CER. A Whisper-base fine-tuned on the same data achieves 44.54% WER and 15.61% CER, confirming that model capacity matters for this low-resource setting. The dataset, fine-tuned model, and a live transcription demo are publicly available on HuggingFace.

6 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables. Code and data available at this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

I.2.7; I.5.4; J.5

arXiv:2606.03504 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.03504v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03504 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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