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Surt v3 — Whisper-small fine-tune for Gurbani (Sehaj Path + Kirtan)

Name: surt-small-v3
Availability: InStock

Surt v3 is a fine-tuned openai/whisper-small for automatic speech recognition of Gurbani in Gurmukhi script — covering both sehaj-path (calm recitation) and kirtan (sung/musical) traditions. Trained on ~660h of clean, canonicalized Gurbani audio.

This is the final-step (step 12000) model. For the step-11000 best-sehaj-WER checkpoint, see surindersinghssj/surt-small-v3-training.

Headline results

Evaluated on the matched canonical eval sets:

Domain	Dataset	WER	CER
Sehaj	`gurbani-sehajpath-yt-captions-eval-canonical`	16.31	5.25
Kirtan	`gurbani-kirtan-yt-captions-eval-canonical`	54.80	28.00

Best step-11000 checkpoint hits sehaj WER 15.84 / CER 5.15 — available on the training repo (see below).

Highlights

Cold start from base openai/whisper-small — no warm-start, no inherited v1/v2 bias
Sehaj WER 16.31% — major improvement over Surt v2's ~24% (data-leak-adjusted)
Kirtan WER 54.80% — comparable to v2's ~55% but v3 trained on 15× more kirtan, much better CER (28.00 vs v2's higher)
660h of canonicalized Gurbani (sehaj + kirtan), all labels aligned to Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
Gurmukhi output (ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ) — ॥ verse markers stripped from labels during training
Language tag: Punjabi (pa), task=transcribe

Quick start

python

from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline(
    "automatic-speech-recognition",
    model="surindersinghssj/surt-small-v3",
    chunk_length_s=30,
)
result = pipe("path/to/audio.wav", generate_kwargs={"language": "punjabi", "task": "transcribe"})
print(result["text"])

Or with direct model / processor access:

python

from transformers import WhisperForConditionalGeneration, WhisperProcessor

processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained("surindersinghssj/surt-small-v3", language="punjabi", task="transcribe")
model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("surindersinghssj/surt-small-v3")
model.generation_config.language = "punjabi"
model.generation_config.task = "transcribe"
model.generation_config.forced_decoder_ids = None

Live demo: Gradio Space.

Training data

Source	Repo	Hours	Role
New sehaj (publicly available recordings with aligned transcripts)	`gurbani-sehajpath-yt-captions-canonical`	~160h	Primary sehaj stream
Old sehaj (studio)	`gurbani-sehajpath`	~66h	Extra sehaj stream
Kirtan (publicly available recordings with aligned transcripts)	`gurbani-kirtan-yt-captions-300h-canonical`	~420h	Aux kirtan stream

Training mix: ~220h sehaj (36%) + ~420h kirtan (64%) via oversampling aux at AUX_TRAIN_PROBABILITY=0.64. Text column normalized to final_text on all canonical sources. Old sehaj's gurmukhi_text column renamed at load.

Evaluation

Sehaj trajectory

Step	WER	CER
500	27.57	8.30
2000	26.17	8.20
5000	24.13	7.57
7500	16.97	5.54
9000	16.17	5.17
11000	15.84	5.15
12000 (final)	16.31	5.25

Kirtan (on the matched `gurbani-kirtan-yt-captions-eval-canonical` set, `train` split, 573 rows)

Step	WER	CER
7500	57.36	29.66
9000	54.92	28.27
12000 (final)	54.80	28.00

Note on the "pure" kirtan eval: an earlier eval used during training (gurbani-kirtan-eval-pure-canonical, eval split) showed inflated kirtan WER in the 119–135% range. That was a label-format mismatch — the "pure" eval references include extra markup the model was trained to strip. The numbers above use the matched canonical eval set.

Training procedure

Framework: 🤗 Transformers Seq2SeqTrainer (custom SurtTrainer with discriminative LR)
Precision: bf16
Attention: SDPA / Flash Attention 2 when installed
Hardware: 1× NVIDIA A40 (48 GB VRAM)
Wall-clock: ~6h 29m

Hyperparameters

Knob	Value
`max_steps`	12000
Per-device batch	32
Grad accumulation	2
Effective batch	64
Encoder LR	5e-5
Decoder LR	3e-5
LR scheduler	cosine
Warmup steps	900 (~7.5%)
Weight decay	0.01
Generation max length	448 tokens
Label-length filter	drop rows with >448 tokens

Data augmentation (raw waveform, pre-feature-extraction)

Gaussian noise @ p=0.4
Room reverb @ p=0.3
Time stretch 0.9–1.1 @ p=0.1
No pitch shift (kirtan is tonal — pitch distortion corrupts raga tonal center)

Intended use

Transcription of sehaj-path recitation recordings (best-performing domain, WER 16.31%)
Transcription of Gurbani kirtan audio (WER 54.80%, CER 28.00% — sung/musical context)
Input audio: 16 kHz mono, ≤30 seconds per chunk (Whisper's native window; auto-chunked in the Gradio demo)

Out-of-scope / limitations

Not trained on non-Gurbani Punjabi speech — expect degradation on everyday Punjabi conversation
Not trained on English / Hindi / other languages — base Whisper multilingual ability is mostly lost after full fine-tune
Speaker / mic / recording bias — training data skews toward publicly available web-sourced recordings with aligned transcripts; live Darbar Sahib PA reverb or noisy field recordings may WER worse
Katha (spoken commentary) is not in the training distribution — quality will vary

How this compares to prior Surt versions

Version	Base	Training data	Sehaj WER	Kirtan WER
Surt v1	whisper-small	66h sehaj only	~24% (leak-inflated; true ~40–50%)	— (hallucinates)
Surt v2	Surt v1	v1 + 28h noisy kirtan v2	~regressed	~55% (28h kirtan)
Surt v3	whisper-small (cold start)	660h canonical mixed	16.31% (final) / 15.84% (best)	54.80% (final)

Surt v3 matches or slightly improves on v2's kirtan WER while using 15× more kirtan data and achieving a much cleaner, script-aware sehaj model — all from a cold-start base, eliminating leak concerns.

License

Apache 2.0, inheriting from openai/whisper-small.

Citation

@misc{surt-v3-2026,
  title        = {Surt v3: Whisper-small fine-tune for Gurbani ASR},
  author       = {Singh, Surinder},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/surindersinghssj/surt-small-v3}}
}

surindersinghssj/surt-small-v3