Dialectal Arabic datasets embody a range of domain, dialect, and quality. To better understand the landscape of these datasets, we perform a computational analysis of the ‘dialectness’ and a set of measures of audio quality. This analysis of the training splits of dialectal Arabic datasets, provides a valuable complement to existing literature surveys of dialectal Arabic.To further address inconsistencies between datasets, we also introduce Arab Voices, a standardized framework for supporting Automatic Speech Recognition in dialectal Arabic. This framework provide access to 31 datasets covering 14 dialects, to better address the limited data availability encountered in dialectal Arabic speech processing. Our benchmark further provides a current evaluation of SOTA tools as well as modern multimodal LLMs at dialectal Arabic ASR.

We present the findings of the sixth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI 2025) Shared Task, which focused on Arabic speech dialect processing across three subtasks: spoken dialect identification (Subtask 1), speech recognition (Subtask 2), and diacritic restoration for spoken dialects (Subtask 3). A total of 44 teams registered, and during the testing phase, 100 valid submissions were received from eight unique teams. The distribution was as follows: 34 submissions for Subtask 1 five teams, 47 submissions for Subtask 2 six teams, and 19 submissions for Subtask 3 two teams. The best-performing systems achieved 79.8% accuracy on Subtask 1, 35.68/12.20 WER/CER (overall average) on Subtask 2, and 55/13 WER/CER on Subtask 3. These results highlight the ongoing challenges of Arabic dialect speech processing, particularly in dialect identification, recognition, and diacritic restoration. We also summarize the methods adopted by participating teams and briefly outline directions for future editions of NADI.

Arabic is a complex language with many varieties and dialects spoken by ~ 450 millions all around the world. Due to the linguistic diversity and vari-ations, it is challenging to build a robust and gen-eralized ASR system for Arabic. In this work, we address this gap by developing and demoing a system, dubbed VoxArabica, for dialect identi-fication (DID) as well as automatic speech recog-nition (ASR) of Arabic. We train a wide range of models such as HuBERT (DID), Whisper, and XLS-R (ASR) in a supervised setting for Arabic DID and ASR tasks. Our DID models are trained to identify 17 different dialects in addition to MSA. We finetune our ASR models on MSA, Egyptian, Moroccan, and mixed data. Additionally, for the re-maining dialects in ASR, we provide the option to choose various models such as Whisper and MMS in a zero-shot setting. We integrate these models into a single web interface with diverse features such as audio recording, file upload, model selec-tion, and the option to raise flags for incorrect out-puts. Overall, we believe VoxArabica will be use-ful for a wide range of audiences concerned with Arabic research. Our system is currently running at https://cdce-206-12-100-168.ngrok.io/.