On Top of Pasketti: Children’s Speech Recognition Challenge - Phonetic Track

In the Phonetic Track of the On Top of Pasketti: Children's Speech Recognition Challenge, your goal is to build a model that predicts the speech sounds, or phones, spoken by children in short audio clips. Unlike word-level ASR, which focuses on intended lexical content, phonetic ASR captures how speech is produced. This distinction is especially important for children, whose speech varies widely due to development, dialect, and speech sound disorders. Accurate phone-level transcriptions enable diagnostic and educational applications such as speech pathology screening, literacy assessment, and early intervention. This track brings together well-labeled, representative children's speech data to support models that generalize across ages, dialects, recording environments, and speech styles. Data for this challenge are assembled from over a dozen data sources collected under different protocols, with manual corrections and annotations added by our team. These sources have been harmonized to a common schema and released as two distinct training corpora that share the same structure but contain different data, and are hosted in separate locations for participant access.