Egyptian and Nigerian English join the Open ASR Leaderboard
- ID
- 43737
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 06 Nov 2026, 8:00 AM
- Fetched
- 06 Nov 2026, 7:22 PM
- Provider
- Hugging Face Blog
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://huggingface.co/blog/open-asr-leaderboard-liva
- Source URL
- https://huggingface.co/blog/feed.xml
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 06 Nov 2026, 7:22 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersai_agent_users
What happened
Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard added two new private held-out splits from data provider Liva AI: Egyptian English (1.34 hours) and Nigerian English (1.55 hours), both conversational, spontaneous speech transcribed with punctuation, casing, and disfluencies preserved. The leaderboard now reports accent breakdowns using Kachru's Three Circles — Inner Circle (US, UK, Australia, Canada) vs. Outer & Expanding Circles (India, Nigeria, Egypt) — with plans to split Outer and Expanding as more accents arrive. This follows earlier private splits from Appen, DataOceanAI, and Voice Arena for Indian-accented English.
Why it matters
If you pick an ASR model off the Open ASR Leaderboard, its ranking now shifts depending on whether you read the US/non-US or Inner vs. Outer/Expanding Circle view — so check which bucket your actual users fall into before choosing. Note also that the new coverage is still only ~1.3–1.6 hours per accent and covers no Southeast Asian English variety, so a leaderboard-topping model gives you no evidence for Malaysian or Manglish speech; you'd still need your own eval set.
Discussion angle
The leaderboard is adding African and South Asian English accents but still nothing for Malay, Manglish, or Singlish — if you're shipping voice agents in Malaysia, what would it take to contribute or build a small local held-out split, and how many hours would you actually need?