Japanese large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition system based on microsoft whisper

Input of Asian ideographic characters has traditionally been one of the biggest impediments for information processing in Asia. Speech is arguably the most effective and efficient input method for Asian non-spelling characters. This paper presents a Japanese large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition system based on Microsoft Whisper technology. We focus on the aspects of the system that are language specific and demonstrate the adaptability of the Whisper system to new languages. In this paper, we demonstrate that our pronunciation/part-of-speech distinguished morpheme based language models and Whisper based Japanese senonic acoustic models are able to yield state-of-the-art Japanese LVCSR recognition performance. The speaker-independent character and Kana error rates on the JNAS database are 10% and 5% respectively.