@inproceedings{hasan-roy-dipta-2025-banglatalk,
    title = "{B}angla{T}alk: Towards Real-Time Speech Assistance for {B}engali Regional Dialects",
    author = "Hasan, Jakir  and
      Roy Dipta, Shubhashis",
    editor = "Alam, Firoj  and
      Kar, Sudipta  and
      Chowdhury, Shammur Absar  and
      Hassan, Naeemul  and
      Prince, Enamul Hoque  and
      Tasnim, Mohiuddin  and
      Rony, Md Rashad Al Hasan  and
      Rahman, Md Tahmid Rahman",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP-2025)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.banglalp-1.4/",
    pages = "44--60",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-314-2",
    abstract = "Real-time speech assistants are becoming increasingly popular for ensuring improved accessibility to information. Bengali, being a low-resource language with a high regional dialectal diversity, has seen limited progress in developing such systems. Existing systems are not optimized for real-time use and focus only on standard Bengali. In this work, we present BanglaTalk, the first real-time speech assistance system for Bengali regional dialects. BanglaTalk follows the client-server architecture and uses the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) to ensure low-latency communication. To address dialectal variation, we introduce a dialect-aware ASR system, BRDialect, developed by fine-tuning the IndicWav2Vec model in ten Bengali regional dialects. It outperforms the baseline ASR models by 12.41-33.98{\%} on the RegSpeech12 dataset. Furthermore, BanglaTalk can operate at a low bandwidth of 24 kbps while maintaining an average end-to-end delay of 4.9 seconds. Low bandwidth usage and minimal end-to-end delay make the system both cost-effective and interactive for real-time use cases, enabling inclusive and accessible speech technology for the diverse community of Bengali speakers."
}