Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark dataset of 50 simulated medical and non-medical African-accented English conversations, designed to evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and related technologies. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) speaker diarization and ASR systems on long-form, accented speech, comparing their performance with native accents and discover a 10%+ performance degradation. Additionally, we explore medical conversation summarization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to demonstrate the impact of ASR errors on downstream medical summaries, providing insights into the challenges and opportunities for speech technologies in the Global South. Our work highlights the need for more inclusive datasets to advance conversational AI in low-resource settings.

This paper evaluates the language understanding capabilities of various large language models (LLMs) through an analysis of 112 translated and human-edited questions from the Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) dataset, focusing specifically on two underrepresented languages: Latvian and Giriama. The study compares the performance of six state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, with OpenAI’s o1-preview model demonstrating superior performance across all languages, significantly outperforming non-proprietary models in Latvian and all other models in Giriama. Human editing of automated translations from English to Latvian yielded only a small, statistically insignificant improvement in performance estimates, suggesting that machine-translated benchmarks may be sufficient for comparing model performance in languages with established digital resources like Latvian. However, automated translation to Giriama proved infeasible, and model performance in Giriama remained poor, highlighting the persistent challenges LLMs face with low-resource languages. These findings underscore the need for more comprehensive datasets and improved machine translation capabilities for underrepresented languages, while emphasizing the importance of localized benchmarks and human evaluation in addressing cultural and contextual limitations in AI models.

Despite the recent progress on scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) to several under-resourced African languages, accurately measuring this progress remains challenging, since evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU, which typically show a weaker correlation with human judgments. Learned metrics such as COMET have higher correlation; however, the lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines for error detection and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET: COMET evaluation metrics for African languages by leveraging DA data from well-resourced languages and an African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-R) to create the state-of-the-art MT evaluation metrics for African languages with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (0.441).