IARPA said the Automatic Speech In Reverberant Environments Challenge seeks approaches that will enable consistent ASR performance in different acoustic environments and conditions.
The agency will post on the ASpIRE challenge website 15 hours of transcribed multimicrophone speech recordings that participants can use to develop or test their ASR software.
IARPA said the evaluation period will also include another 10 hours of far-field, single-microphone and multimicrophone recordings in a reverberant room environment.
All submissions will be judged on word error rate, it added.
The participant with the winning single-microphone software will receive $30,000, while the winner for the multimicrophone condition will receive $20,000.