Whisper-small for English Dialect Classification
Model Description
This model includes the implementation of English dialect classification described in Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialect and Regional Languages Around the Globe
Github repository: https://github.com/tiantiaf0627/voxlect
The included English dialects are:
[
'East Asia',
'English',
'Germanic',
'Irish',
'North America',
'Northern Irish',
'Oceania',
'Other',
'Romance',
'Scottish',
'Semitic',
'Slavic',
'South African',
'Southeast Asia',
'South Asia',
'Welsh'
]
Compared to Vox-Profile English accent/dialect models, we trained with additional speech data from TIMIT and ParaSpeechCaps.
How to use this model
Download repo
git clone git@github.com:tiantiaf0627/voxlect
Install the package
conda create -n voxlect python=3.8
cd voxlect
pip install -e .
Load the model
# Load libraries
import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F
from src.model.dialect.whisper_dialect import WhisperWrapper
# Find device
device = torch.device("cuda") if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"
# Load model from Huggingface
model = WhisperWrapper.from_pretrained("tiantiaf/voxlect-english-dialect-whisper-small").to(device)
model.eval()
Prediction
# Label List
dialect_list = [
'East Asia',
'English',
'Germanic',
'Irish',
'North America',
'Northern Irish',
'Oceania',
'Other',
'Romance',
'Scottish',
'Semitic',
'Slavic',
'South African',
'Southeast Asia',
'South Asia',
'Welsh'
]
# Load data, here just zeros as the example
# Our training data filters output audio shorter than 3 seconds (unreliable predictions) and longer than 15 seconds (computation limitation)
# So you need to prepare your audio to a maximum of 15 seconds, 16kHz and mono channel
max_audio_length = 15 * 16000
data = torch.zeros([1, 16000]).float().to(device)[:, :max_audio_length]
logits, embeddings = model(data, return_feature=True)
# Probability and output
dialect_prob = F.softmax(logits, dim=1)
print(dialect_list[torch.argmax(dialect_prob).detach().cpu().item()])
Responsible Use: Users should respect the privacy and consent of the data subjects, and adhere to the relevant laws and regulations in their jurisdictions when using Voxlect.
If you have any questions, please contact: Tiantian Feng (tiantiaf@usc.edu)
❌ Out-of-Scope Use
- Clinical or diagnostic applications
- Surveillance
- Privacy-invasive applications
- No commercial use
If you like our work or use the models in your work, kindly cite the following. We appreciate your recognition!
@article{feng2025voxlect,
title={Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialects and Regional Languages Around the Globe},
author={Feng, Tiantian and Huang, Kevin and Xu, Anfeng and Shi, Xuan and Lertpetchpun, Thanathai and Lee, Jihwan and Lee, Yoonjeong and Byrd, Dani and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01691},
year={2025}
}