arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

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

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2606.03504 (cs)
[Submitted on 2 Jun 2026]

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

Authors:Muhammad Ali
View a PDF of the paper titled BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language, by Muhammad Ali
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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.
Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Code and data available at this https URL
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
ACM classes: I.2.7; I.5.4; J.5
Cite as: arXiv:2606.03504 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2606.03504v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03504
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Muhammad Ali [view email]
[v1] Tue, 2 Jun 2026 11:23:49 UTC (669 KB)
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