AI RESEARCH
WAXAL-NET: Finetuned Edge ASR Across 19 African Languages
arXiv CS.CL
•
ArXi:2606.02375v1 Announce Type: new We evaluate whether compact domain-specialized ASR models can outperform massively multilingual foundation models for conversational African speech across 19 languages in the WAXAL corpus. Fine-tuned edge models achieve a macro-averaged WER of $38.0\%$ compared to $64.9\%$ for the best zero-shot baseline, a $26.9$ percentage-point reduction using models $3-40\times$ smaller. Results confirm that domain specialization dominates scale for spontaneous African speech.