Speech-to-text (ST) task is the translation of speech in a language to text in a different language. It has use cases in subtitling, dubbing, etc. Traditionally, ST task has been solved by cascading automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) models which leads to error propagation, high latency, and training time. To minimize such issues, end-to-end models have been proposed recently. However, we find that only a few works have reported results of ST models on a limited number of low-resource languages. To take a step further in this direction, we release datasets and baselines for low-resource ST tasks. Concretely, our dataset has 9 language pairs and benchmarking has been done against SOTA ST models. The low performance of SOTA ST models on Indic-TEDST data indicates the necessity of the development of ST models specifically designed for low-resource languages.

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and Indic languages. The shared tasks attracted 17 teams whose submissions are documented in 27 system papers. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.