Whisper Fine-Tuning for Domain Speech Recognition
Base Whisper large-v3 shows WER 8–15% on general speech. On specialized vocabulary WER rises to 25–40%. Fine-tuning on domain dataset reduces it to 3–8%.
When Fine-Tuning is Needed
Poor recognition on:
- Rare terminology: medical terms, legal abbreviations
- Regional accented speech
- Noisy recordings (call center, factory)
- Code-switching (mixing languages)
Dataset Preparation
Minimum for improvement: 10–20 hours Optimal: 50–100 hours
Format: audio file + text transcript pairs
Results by Domain
Domain-specific fine-tuning reduces WER significantly across medical, legal, financial, and technical domains.
Timeline: label corpus — 2–3 weeks. Fine-tuning — 1 week. Integration — 3–5 days.