Great Improvements for Brazilian Portuguese and Canadian French ASR

There’s something hugely satisfying about overtaking your competitors after putting in the hard work. It’s even more of a win when you find yourself way out in front, as we have with our latest uplift across two of our most often used languages French and Portuguese. In particular, looking at the significant improvements to these models and what they mean for Brazilian Portuguese and Canadian French ASR.

Using a wide range of test sets, we’ve challenged both our Enhanced and Standard models on two fronts. First, we see how both models test against our last update from earlier this year, then it’s up against rivals from Big Tech, like Google, and Microsoft.

Huge Uplift for Canadian French

Let’s begin with our hugely impressive uplift concerning Canadian French. In Quebec alone, it’s believed over 7 million people speak a variety of Canadian French, making up 22% of the Canadian population. A further 2 million speak it as a second language. Using a 6-hour dataset from Journal des débats de l'Assemblée nationale, we saw an average relative reduction in Word Error Rate (WER) of 18% for our Standard model and 13% for our Enhanced.

What’s more, the huge leaps we’ve made with our Standard model mean we’re now ahead of all our competitors, as illustrated in the table of results below. (We’ve displayed these results in terms of accuracy of speech recognition for Canadian French, which is simply 100 – WER).