An approach to measuring the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models in the context of Large Language Model (LLM) powered applications

Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) plays a crucial role in human-machine interaction and serves as an interface for a wide range of applications. Traditionally, ASR performance has been evaluated using Word Error Rate (WER), a metric that quantifies the number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions in the generated transcriptions. However, with the increasing adoption of large and powerful LLMs as the core processing component in various applications, the significance of different types of ASR errors in downstream tasks warrants further exploration. In this work, we analyze the capabilities of LLMs to correct errors introduced by ASRs and propose a new measure to evaluate ASR performance for LLM-powered applications.