Hugging Face adds Egyptian and Nigerian English to Open ASR Leaderboard

Hugging Face announced a collaboration with Liva AI to add two private datasets of spontaneous conversational speech to the Open ASR Leaderboard: 1.34 hours of Egyptian-accented English and 1.55 hours of Nigerian-accented English. The transcripts are punctuated, cased and include disfluencies. Hugging Face says private data helps reduce benchmark over-optimization and make automatic speech recognition (ASR) evaluations more trustworthy and representative.

The update also enables a more detailed accent breakdown in the private-data tab: the United States versus non-US countries, and Kachru’s Inner Circle — the United States, the UK, Australia and Canada — versus the Outer and Expanding Circles — India, Nigeria and Egypt. Hugging Face says it plans to split the latter two groups as more accents are added. Liva AI collects multimodal interaction data through consumer products used by real people.