BanglaTalk: Towards Real-Time Speech Assistance for Bengali Regional Dialects

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.