CLSep 24, 2025

WEST: LLM based Speech Toolkit for Speech Understanding, Generation, and Interaction

arXiv:2509.19902v21 citationsh-index: 5Has Code
Originality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis

It provides a versatile, accessible toolkit for speech processing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM architectures and methods.

The paper introduces WEST, a speech toolkit based on a large language model (LLM) for tasks like recognition, synthesis, understanding, dialogue, and multimodal capabilities, offering both reproducible open-source versions and high-performance models trained on massive data.

In this paper, we present WEST(WE Speech Toolkit), a speech toolkit based on a large language model (LLM) for speech understanding, generation, and interaction. There are three key features of WEST: 1) Fully LLM-based: Standing on the shoulders of giants by reusing mature architectures, ecosystems (e.g., Hugging Face), and methods (e.g., sequence packing) from large models. 2) Full-stack: Supports tasks such as recognition, synthesis, understanding, dialogue, and multimodal capabilities, with extensibility to incorporate open-source models. 3) Simple and Stupid: A simple and stupid speech toolkit that everyone can Touch. In addition, WEST provides two types of recipes, models, and experimental results. The first is entirely based on open-source models and open-source data, allowing users to fully reproduce the experiments in this paper and serving as a verification system or minimal system baseline. The second is trained on massive data, offering superior performance so the user can directly apply it out of the box. WEST is publicly avilable at https://github.com/wenet-e2e/west/

Foundations

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