Glossary
Low-resource language
A low-resource language is one with little digital speech and text data for training speech recognition and other language tools. There is no fixed cutoff, and a language can be well resourced for one task and poorly resourced for another.
Updated October 17, 20264 cited facts, each traced to its source
Also called under-resourced language.
A low-resource language is a language with little digital data for building language technology: few hours of transcribed speech, little written text, and few tools. The same idea is called an under-resourced language. Nothing sets a fixed cutoff. Meta's Omnilingual ASR work, for example, uses less than 10 hours of training audio per language as its low-resource group. Other projects draw the line elsewhere.
Less training data means lower accuracy
The data shortage shows up in the results. In Omnilingual ASR, only 36 percent of the languages with less than 10 hours of training audio meet the character error rate threshold of 10 percent 1.
Being listed as supported is not the same as being accurate
A language can be supported by a product and still be weak in it. SeamlessM4T's language table marks Zulu as low-resource for speech translation into English 2. In a speech test of Indian English accents, the recognizers performed poorly for speakers whose first language is Assamese, Bodo or Nepali, which the authors describe as low-resource languages from northeastern India 3. A support list tells you that the language is available, not how well it will be transcribed.
Why it matters for dictation
If your language is low-resource, expect more misrecognized words, weaker punctuation and less help from the tool. Check the accuracy of your own language rather than relying on the number of supported languages. The dictation languages guide lists what each app and device supports, and the question on whether speech recognition is worse in other languages explains the gap. Testing with a short recording of your own speech is the most useful check.
Mixed languages make the problem harder
A low-resource language is often spoken alongside a larger one. The authors of a 2025 study say that the shortage of annotated code-switched audio makes recognition harder even when each language in the mix is well resourced 4. Mixed speech that includes a low-resource language is therefore one of the hardest cases for dictation. See code-switching.
Related terms
- Spoken language identification: detecting the language before recognition.
- Character error rate: a common accuracy measure for languages written without word spaces.
- Code-switching: mixing two languages in one utterance.
Guides that cover it
Evidence
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Related terms
- Dictation Languages, Accents and Voice TranslationThe topic this term belongs to
- AccentAn accent is the way a speaker pronounces a language, shaped by where they grew up, their first language or their community. Accents change pronunciation, not vocabulary, and speech recognition error rates can differ sharply from one accent to another.
- Character error rate (CER)Character error rate (CER) is the number of character insertions, substitutions and deletions needed to turn a recognizer's output into the correct text, divided by the number of characters in the correct text. It is the usual measure where words are not separated by spaces.
- Code-switchingCode-switching is the habit of moving between two or more languages within a conversation or a single sentence. Speech recognizers built around one language often misread the switched words, so mixed speech is harder to dictate than speech in one language.
- DiacriticsDiacritics are marks added to a letter, such as the acute accent in é, the tilde in ñ or the vowel marks in Arabic, that change how a letter sounds or which word it spells. Speech tools and everyday writers often leave them out, so a dictated word can come out spelled differently from what you meant.
- DialectA dialect is a regional or social variety of a language, with its own vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Speech recognition is usually less accurate on dialects than on the standard form, because labeled training data for dialects is often scarcer.
- Input method editor (IME)An input method editor (IME) is software that supports text input for characters that cannot be typed easily on a standard keyboard, such as many East Asian characters. Speech input can also be an input method, and Android allows only one input method to be enabled at a time.
- LocaleA locale is a language combined with a region, and sometimes a script, such as en-GB for English as used in the United Kingdom. Dictation and speech settings use locales because the same language can differ in spelling, punctuation and speech patterns from one region to another.
- Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), also called Fusha, is the standardized form of Arabic used in writing and formal speech, such as news broadcasts and official documents. Speakers use regional dialects in everyday conversation, and speech tools recognize formal Arabic more accurately than dialect speech.
- Non-native speechNon-native speech is speech in a language that is not the speaker's first language, often called L2 speech or foreign-accented speech. Recognizers can transcribe read non-native English well, but they handle hesitations, repetitions and revisions differently, and results depend on the system.
- PinyinPinyin, also called Hanyu Pinyin, is the system that spells Mandarin Chinese syllables with the Latin alphabet and marks the tones with diacritics. People type Chinese by spelling the sound in Pinyin and choosing the character they want, and speech tools must choose among characters that share one Pinyin spelling.
- Right-to-left (RTL) scriptA right-to-left (RTL) script is a writing system, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu, whose letters run from right to left. Text that mixes these letters with digits or Latin words is bidirectional, so software needs a specific algorithm to order and display it.
- Speech translationSpeech translation converts speech in one language into the same meaning in another language, as text or as synthesized speech. Most systems first recognize the speech and then translate the text, so a recognition error carries into the translation.
Pages that use this term
- Dictation Languages, Accents and Voice TranslationTopic
- Dictation Languages: What Each App and Device SupportsGuide
- How to Translate Audio and Video to English TextGuide
- Whisper Supported Languages and Accuracy by LanguageGuide
- Transcribe and Translate Audio in Other LanguagesGuide
- Can AI transcribe Zulu, Xhosa and other African languages?Question
- Can you translate Zulu or Xhosa audio to English?Question
- Do people speak faster in some languages?Question
- How accurate is speech to text translation?Question
- Is speech recognition less accurate in languages other than English?Question
- Character error rate (CER)Glossary
- Code-switchingGlossary
- Spoken language identificationGlossary