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arXiv · 2605.19069

Benchmarking Commercial ASR Systems on Code-Switching Speech: Arabic, Persian, and German

Sajjad Abdoli·Ghassan Al-Sumaidaee·Clayton W. Taylor·Ahmad ElShiekh·Ahmed Rashad
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Abstract

Code-switching -- the natural alternation between two languages within a single utterance -- remains one of the most challenging and under-studied conditions for automatic speech recognition (ASR). We present a benchmark evaluating five commercial ASR providers across four language pairs: Egyptian Arabic--English, Saudi Arabic (Najdi/Hijazi)--English, Persian (Farsi)--English, and German--English, comprising 300 samples per pair selected by a two-stage pipeline combining heuristic filtering with a GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro ensemble scorer, reducing LLM costs by $\approx$91\%. We evaluate on both WER and BERTScore, showing that while both metrics agree on the ordinal ranking of systems for all Arabic and Persian pairs ($τ= 1.0$), WER inflates the magnitude of quality gaps by approximately 3$\times$ by penalising semantically correct transliteration choices. ElevenLabs Scribe v2 achieves the lowest WER (13.2\% overall) and leads on BERTScore (0.936 overall). Difficulty-stratified analysis reveals performance gaps masked by aggregate averages, and BERT embedding projections confirm semantic proximity between reference and hypothesis despite surface-level script differences. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Perle-ai/ASR_Code_Switch.

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Sajjad Abdoli, Ghassan Al-Sumaidaee, Clayton W. Taylor, Ahmad ElShiekh, Ahmed Rashad. 2026-05-22. Benchmarking Commercial ASR Systems on Code-Switching Speech: Arabic, Persian, and German. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19069

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