Quality management when creating large-scale speech datasets is essential for building reliable downstream models, yet verification pipelines are often brittle, domain-specific, and expertise-intensive. We introduce **SpeechQM-Agent**, a natural language-driven agentic framework that compiles user requirements into dependency-aware DAG workflows over modular tools for audio, transcript, and metadata verification. A central planner LLM enforces prerequisites and supports execution-time replanning (e.g., re-running failed steps or swapping tools), reducing manual pipeline engineering and improving robustness across heterogeneous vendor formats and multilingual settings. We also release **SpeechQM-Dataset**, a multilingual benchmark with controlled, vendor-inspired quality artifacts spanning 24 verification tasks. Across experiments, SpeechQM-Agent attains **80-90%** agreement with expert verification while requiring **<20%** of the cost and time of manual QC, and we further validate transfer to real vendor-supplied corpora. Planner LLM comparisons highlight fidelity-efficiency trade-offs.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for low-resource languages like Hindi often produce erroneous transcripts due to limited annotated data and linguistic complexity. Post-ASR correction using language models (LMs) and large language models (LLMs) offers a promising approach to improve transcription quality. In this work, we compare fine-tuned LMs (mT5, ByT5), fine-tuned LLMs (Nanda 10B), and instruction-tuned LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA variants) for post-ASR correction in Hindi. Our findings reveal that smaller, fine-tuned models consistently outperform larger LLMs in both fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) settings. We observe a n-shaped inverse scaling trend under zero-shot ICL, where mid-sized LLMs degrade performance before marginal recovery at extreme scales, yet still fall short of fine-tuned models. ByT5 is more effective for character-level corrections such as transliteration and word segmentation, while mT5 handles broader semantic inconsistencies. We also identify performance drops in out-of-domain settings and propose mitigation strategies to preserve domain fidelity. In particular, we observe similar trends in Marathi and Telugu, indicating the broader applicability of our findings across low-resource Indian languages.

In this work, we address the challenge of cross-lingual proper noun recognition in automatic speech recognition (ASR), where proper nouns in an utterance may originate from a language different from the language in which the ASR system is trained. We enhance the performance of end-to-end ASR systems by instructing a large language model (LLM) to correct the ASR model’s predictions. The LLM’s context is augmented with a dictionary of cross-lingual words that are phonetically and graphemically similar to the potentially incorrect proper nouns in the ASR predictions. Our dictionary-based method DiP-ASR (Dictionary-based Prompting for Automatic Speech Recognition) significantly reduces word error rates compared to both the end-to-end ASR baseline and instruction-based prompting of the LLM without the dictionary across cross-lingual proper noun recognition tasks involving three secondary languages.