Careless Whisper: Speech-to-Text Hallucination Harms

Speech-to-text services aim to transcribe input audio as accurately as possible. They increasingly play a role in everyday life, for example in personal voice assistants or in customer-company interactions. We evaluate Open AI's Whisper, a state-of-the-art service outperforming industry competitors. While many of Whisper's transcriptions were highly accurate, we found that roughly 1% of audio transcriptions contained entire hallucinated phrases or sentences, which did not exist in any form in the underlying audio. We thematically analyze the Whisper-hallucinated content, finding …

aim art assistants audio competitors cs.cl cs.cy customer example found hallucination industry interactions life open ai role service services speech speech-to-text state text transcribe voice voice assistants whisper