webASR 2 — Improved Cloud Based Speech Technology

This paper presents the most recent developments of the webASR service (www.webasr.org), the world’s first web-based fully functioning automatic speech recognition platform for scientific use. Initially released in 2008, the functionalities of webASR have recently been expanded with 3 main goals in mind: Facilitate access through a RESTful architecture, that allows for easy use through either the web interface or an API; allow the use of input metadata when available by the user to improve system performance; and increase the coverage of available systems beyond speech recognition. Several new systems for transcription, diarisation, lightly supervised alignment and translation are currently available through webASR. The results in a series of well-known benchmarks (RT’09, IWSLT’12 and MGB’15 evaluations) show how these webASR systems provides state-of-the-art performances across these tasks.