Anuvani-Diarization: Zero Shot Speaker Diarization and Annotation Conventions Across 22 Languages

Abstract

India's 22 scheduled languages are spoken by over a billion people in conversations that mix languages, often within one turn, overlap freely, and take place over telephones, in meetings, and in media. Knowing who spoke when, the task of speaker diarization, is essential to speech applications for such conversation: voice agents conversing with several people at once, speaker attributed transcription of meetings and calls, contact center analytics, and media monitoring. We present a systematic study of speaker diarization across all 22 languages on IndicDiarBench and introduce Anuvani-Diarization, which adapts a self-supervised end-to-end segmentation model to Indian conversation with uncertainty aware silver supervision. Evaluated zero shot alongside nine recent diarization systems, it reaches a duration weighted diarization error rate (DER) of 16.78% on all 1,164 recordings, the lowest of all systems we ran and second only to the best published result (16.0%), and leads the three strongest rivals in 14 of 22 languages. It matches its parent on six international benchmarks. We also show that the benchmark's utterance level annotation convention is a hidden variable worth 1.9 to 4.1 DER points, depending on the system, and that a convention learned from other Indian transcriptions does not transfer.