Organiser | Shared Task: ASR and Language Resources for Indigenous Languages

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Speech Recognition for Indigenous Languages: The SIMBig 2026 Shared Task

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why a shared task?

Most Indigenous languages of South America are still absent from voice-driven AI. (qxp) is spoken by around 470,000 people in southern Peru, yet until this year it had no dedicated speech recognition (ASR) resources. Speakers are often not literate in their own language, so text-heavy tools leave them out. Speech recognition can meet them where they are: in spoken language.

Between January and February 2026, together with the National University of Altiplano Puno, the Puno Regional Government and the Illariy Ch’aska association, we ran a participatory data collection campaign. 151 native speakers contributed, and the result is the largest speech corpus for any single Quechua variety: 66 hours of scripted and spontaneous speech, released openly under CC0-1.0 on Mozilla Data Collective. We also published the first ASR benchmark for Puno Quechua at .

A corpus only matters if people use it.

That is why we opened the data to everyone through the SIMBig 2026 Shared Task on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Language Resources for Indigenous Languages.

What we asked teams to build

The shared task has three tasks, so that both speech researchers and educators could take part:

Task 1: Puno Quechua ASR. Build a speech recognition system on the Common Voice and datasets. Systems are evaluated with WER and CER against an open baseline, available on .
Task 2: ASR for any Indigenous language of South America. Build ASR for a language that has no system yet, and share the datasets and train/dev/test splits (with a test set of at least 30 minutes).
Task 3: Educational and literacy resources. Create a website, tutorial, notebook, visualisation, video or learning platform that helps people learn, listen to or reuse an Indigenous language.

Task 3 matters as much as the first two. Speech technology is only useful to a community if it reaches learners, teachers and families, not just leaderboards.

Timeline

Date (AoE)	Milestone
10 August 2026	Registration opened
24 August 2026	Datasets released and orientation hour
16 September 2026	Second orientation hour
21 September 2026	Registration closed
30 September 2026	Task 1 test set released
11 October 2026	Abstracts submitted
18 October 2026	Final transcriptions, system papers and videos submitted
28–30 October 2026	Results announced at SIMBig 2026, Arequipa

Winning teams receive prizes, free SIMBig 2026 registration and, after revision, publication of their papers in Springer’s CCIS series.

What comes next

Next week we meet in Arequipa to announce the results and hear from the teams. I will update this post with the results, the winning systems and what we learned.

Thank you

Thank you to the co-organisers Johanna Cordova (ERTIM, Inalco), Juan Antonio Lossio-Ventura (National Institutes of Health) and Hugo Alatrista-Salas (De Vinci Research Centre), and to our advisory committee, Anna Korhonen (University of Cambridge) and Damien Nouvel (ERTIM, Inalco). Thank you to every team that registered, to our reviewers, and above all to the Puno Quechua speakers who lent their voices to this work.

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