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. We fine-tune OpenAI Whisper-small on this corpus and report a Word Error Rate (WER) of 30.07% on a held-out validation set of 538 utterances, down from a measured zero-shot baseline of 182.18% for Whisper-small on Balti. The dataset, fine-tuned model, and a live transcription demo are publicly available on HuggingFace.

5 pages, 4 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:2606.03504v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

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

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