{"ID":2883109,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08684","arxiv_id":"2508.08684","title":"Out of the Box, into the Clinic? Evaluating State-of-the-Art ASR for Clinical Applications for Older Adults","abstract":"Voice-controlled interfaces can support older adults in clinical contexts -- with chatbots being a prime example -- but reliable Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for underrepresented groups remains a bottleneck. This study evaluates state-of-the-art ASR models on language use of older Dutch adults, who interacted with the Welzijn.AI chatbot designed for geriatric contexts. We benchmark generic multilingual ASR models, and models fine-tuned for Dutch spoken by older adults, while also considering processing speed. Our results show that generic multilingual models outperform fine-tuned models, which suggests recent ASR models can generalise well out of the box to real-world datasets. Moreover, our results indicate that truncating generic models is helpful in balancing the accuracy-speed trade-off. Nonetheless, we also find inputs which cause a high word error rate and place them in context.","short_abstract":"Voice-controlled interfaces can support older adults in clinical contexts -- with chatbots being a prime example -- but reliable Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for underrepresented groups remains a bottleneck. This study evaluates state-of-the-art ASR models on language use of older Dutch adults, who interacted wit...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08684","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08684v3","authors":"[\"Bram van Dijk\",\"Tiberon Kuiper\",\"Sirin Aoulad si Ahmed\",\"Armel Levebvre\",\"Jake Johnson\",\"Jan Duin\",\"Simon Mooijaart\",\"Marco Spruit\"]","published":"2025-08-12T07:17:44Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.CY\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}