State-of-the-art ASR systems primarily target native adult speech, leading to substantial performance gaps for children, adolescents, and L2 speakers. We introduce AraYoungVoices, a 151.72-hour Arabic read-speech corpus from 286 speakers aged 7--18, comprising AraKids (7--12) and AraTeens (13--18). The corpus includes...
S. Chowdhury, Zien Sheikh Ali, H. Lachemat et al.· 1 citation
This work introduces MENASpeechBank, a reference speech bank comprising ~18K high-quality utterances from 124 speakers spanning multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic, and regional Arabic varieties, and develops a controllable data pipeline that constructs persona profiles enriched with WVS i...
Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, R. N. Nandi et al.· arXiv.org· 4 citations
This study reviews multi-turn conversational AI across text-only dialogue, AudioLLMs and speech-native systems, multimodal and omni-modal systems, and tool-augmented agents, and concludes with a research agenda for systems that can remember, revise, ground, speak, listen, act, and adapt across turns, modalities, and cu...
S. Sara, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti et al.· 3 citations
An overview of the ImageEval 2026 shared task on culturally grounded Arabic multimodal evaluation is presented, covering spoken visual question answering and image-grounded hallucination detection in English and Modern Standard Arabic, and CRAI-Bench, evaluating the cultural accuracy of text-to-image generation.