Assessing Smartphone Speech Recognition Across Diverse English Accents: A Preliminary Study

This study examines the performance of a smartphone-based automatic speech recognition(ASR) system when processing diverse English accents. With the increasing reliance on voiceactivatedartificial intelligence in daily tasks, ensuring equitable ASR performance across linguisticvarieties is critical. Using audio data from the CIRCE project corpus, we assess recognitionaccuracy for eleven English accents selected according to Kachru’s three-circle model (Inner,Outer, and Expanding Circle varieties). Findings highlight disparities in recognition performanceand suggest that ASR models exhibit a bias favoring American English (AmE). Thestudy underscores the need for enhanced ASR inclusivity and diversification of training data.