Racial disparities in automated speech recognition
Automated speech recognition (ASR) systems are now used in a variety of applications to convert spoken language to text, from virtual assistants, to closed captioning, to hands-free computing. By analyzing a large corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with white and African American speakers, we demo…
Analysis of five state-of-the-art automated speech recognition (ASR) systems—developed by Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft—to transcribe structured interviews conducted with white and black speakers. Researchers found that all five ASR systems exhibited substantial racial disparities and highlight these disparities may actively harm African American communities. For example, when speech recognition software is used by criminal justice organizations to automatically transcribe courtroom proceedings.
