Recent literature has shown that a learned front end with multi-channel audio input can outperform traditional beam-forming algorithms for automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we present our study on multi-channel acoustic modeling using OPUS compression with different bitrates for the different channels. We analyze the degradation in word error rate (WER) as a function of the audio encoding bitrate and show that the WER degrades by 12.6% relative with 16kpbs as compared to uncompressed audio. We show that its always preferable to have a multi-channel audio input over a single channel audio input given limited bandwidth. Our results show that for the best WER, when one of the two channels can be encoded with a bitrate higher than 32kbps, its optimal to encode the other channel with the highest bitrate possible. For bitrates lower than that, its preferable to distribute the bitrate equally between the two channels. We further show that by training the acoustic model on mixed bitrate input, up to 50% of the degradation can be recovered using a single model.
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