# Open ASR Leaderboard adds Egyptian and Nigerian English accents

Digest AI · Research · published 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/open-asr-leaderboard-adds-egyptian-and-nigerian-english-accents

## Summary

The Open ASR Leaderboard has expanded its private data sets to include two new accents: Egyptian and Nigerian English. This addition follows a previous collaboration with Voice Arena for Indian-accented English and earlier integrations with Appen and DataOceanAI. The new data comes from Liva AI, which collects multimodal interaction data through consumer products used by real people. 

The leaderboard will now report performance using a framework based on Kachru’s Three Circles, credited to Hume AI. This allows for a breakdown comparing US English against non-US English (UK, Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, Egypt) and Inner Circle accents against Outer and Expanding Circles. The goal is to improve representation in automatic speech recognition evaluations and reduce overfitting to public benchmarks by using held-out private data. 

Liva AI provides this data by designing products around specific model gaps, allowing for the collection of natural, high-context behavior from real product use rather than artificially elicited interactions. This collaboration aims to make ASR evaluations more trustworthy and representative of global speech patterns.

## Key points

- New private data splits for Egyptian and Nigerian accents added to the Open ASR Leaderboard.
- Liva AI provides the data, collected via consumer products used by real people.
- Leaderboard now reports results using Kachru’s Three Circles framework for accent breakdowns.

## Why it matters

Expanding ASR evaluations to include diverse accents like Egyptian and Nigerian English improves model robustness and fairness. Using private data from real-world interactions helps prevent overfitting and ensures speech recognition systems work better for a global user base.

## Sources

1. [Egyptian and Nigerian English join the Open ASR Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/blog/open-asr-leaderboard-liva) (Hugging Face, 2026-11-06, primary source)

## Cite

Digest AI, "Open ASR Leaderboard adds Egyptian and Nigerian English accents", 6 November 2026, https://digestai.news/story/open-asr-leaderboard-adds-egyptian-and-nigerian-english-accents

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