What Is Overlapping Speech?

Direct definition

Overlapping speech is two or more people talking at the same time. It is one of the hardest conditions for automatic speech recognition and for diarization.

The sections below explain how overlapping speech is used in transcription and subtitle work, what people often mix up, and which VideoText workflow applies when the next step is a file or review pass.

Key takeaways

• Style guides often use [crosstalk] or parallel speaker lines.
• Distant-microphone meeting sets show much higher WER than headset audio.
• Do not pretend an ASR draft resolved overlap if the audio is unintelligible.

Why it is hard

Models trained mostly on single-speaker read speech under-represent overlap. The Whisper paper’s AMI distant-microphone WER (36.4% for Large V2) is a public reminder that meetings are not LibriSpeech.

Related terms

• speaker diarization
• word error rate
• full verbatim
• All glossary terms

Sources

1. OpenAI: Whisper paper, AMI rows in Table 2