⚒️ Model Description
Ethio-ASR is a suite of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for Ethiopian languages. This repo contains a monolingual Amharic ASR model based on wav2vec2‑bert-2.0, fine-tuned on the Amharic subset of the WAXAL Speech Dataset.
- Developed by: Ethio-ASR Team
- Task: Speech Recognition (ASR)
- Language: Amharic
- License: CC-BY-4.0
- Finetuned from: facebook/w2v-bert-2.0
📈 Evaluation on WAXAL Test Set (Amharic)
📌 ASR model in this HF repo
| Model | # Params | Amharic WER (↓) |
|---|---|---|
| Ethio-ASR (afrihubert) | 94M | 30.95 |
| Ethio-ASR (mms-300) | 300M | 30.19 |
| Ethio-ASR (mms-1b) | 1B | 26.14 |
| Ethio-ASR (w2v-bert-2.0) | 600M | 22.92 |
| Monolingual SFT (w2v-bert-2.0) 📌 | 600M | 22.37 |
🎧 Direct Use
from transformers import AutoModelForCTC, AutoProcessor
import torchaudio, torch
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("badrex/Ethio-ASR-amharic")
model = AutoModelForCTC.from_pretrained("badrex/Ethio-ASR-amharic")
audio, sr = torchaudio.load("audio.wav")
inputs = processor(audio.squeeze(), sampling_rate=sr, return_tensors="pt")
with torch.no_grad():
logits = model(**inputs).logits
pred_ids = torch.argmax(logits, dim=-1)
transcription = processor.batch_decode(pred_ids)[0]
print(transcription)
🔧 Downstream Use
- Voice assistants
- Accessibility tools
- Research baselines
🚫 Out‑of‑Scope Use
- Languages other than Amharic
- High‑stakes deployments without human review
- Noisy audio without speech enhancement
⚠️ Risks & Limitations
Performance might vary across dialects, genders, ages, and recording quality.
📌 Citation
@misc{ethio_asr_2026,
author = {
Abdullah, Badr M. and
Azime, Israel Abebe and
Tonja, Atnafu Lambebo and
Alabi, Jesujoba O. and
Alemu, Abel Mulat and
Hagos, Eyob G. and
Balcha, Bontu Fufa and
Nerea, Mulubrhan A. and
Yadeta, Debela Desalegn and
Marilign, Dagnachew Mekonnen and
Fentahun, Amanuel Temesgen and
Kebede, Tadesse and
Gebru, Israel D. and
Woldeyohannis, Michael Melese and
Sewunetie, Walelign Tewabe and
Möbius, Bernd and
Klakow, Dietrich
},
title = {Ethio-ASR: Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Language Identification for Ethiopian Languages},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/badrex/Ethio-ASR-multilingual-600M}}
}