competition · online
Lost in Transcription: Advancing Speech Recognition for Underserved Linguistic Contexts
When it actually closes
Safe cutoff
competition page
- Stated
- “Oct. 2, 2026, midnight UTC”
- Printed zone
- UTC
- IANA zone
- UTC
- UTC
- 2026-10-02T00:00:00Z
- Your time
- Fri Oct 2, 12:00 AM UTC (loading your time zone…)
The trap: 'Midnight UTC' on Oct 2 is the START of Oct 2: Oct 1, 5:00 PM in Las Vegas.
Prizes
$20,000 cash · 7 slots
There are three independent tracks (Spanish-English, Spanish-Nahuatl, Indonesian-Javanese). Each pays 1st $4,000 and 2nd $2,000, so $6,000 per track and $18,000 total. There is also a $2,000 bonus for the team with the lowest average WER across all three tracks, which requires submitting to all three with the same team members. Total is $20,000. The track prizes are separate and stack: "Solvers can compete in any track and earn prizes for each." The bonus stacks on top.
1st place per track (Spanish-English, Spanish-Nahuatl, Indonesian-Javanese)
cash · ×3
$4,000
Track prizes stack; a solver can win in every track
2nd place per track (3 tracks)
cash · ×3
$2,000
Lowest average WER bonus (all three tracks)
cash
$2,000
Requires submitting to all three tracks with the same team; stacks on track prizes
Eligibility
Individuals: eligible
"open to all natural persons who are a legal resident of a country... within the Territory... at least eighteen years of age and the age of majority"
Checked for one adult entering alone from Nevada, USA. Rules can differ by country, so read the rule quoted here for where you live.
Entry cost
Free to enter
Payout
mixed
A check or electronic transfer from DrivenData, LLC (the operator), made out to each individual or team member. Allow 30 days after final verification. US residents get an IRS 1099.
Rights — what you give up
entrant-keeps
Winner License Type is Open Source: to get a prize, the winner licenses the winning submission and its source code under MPL 2.0. There is no assignment and no exclusive license to the sponsor.
Gotchas
- The real cutoff is Oct 1, 2026 at 5:00 PM Nevada time (Oct 2 00:00 UTC), about 4.7 days from now, not the end of Oct 2.
- The forum says the submission limit is 3 scored submissions per 7 days per individual, so a new entrant gets about 3 scored shots per track before close.
- It is a code-execution challenge: you must package an offline Python 3.12 model that runs within 2 hours on 1x A100. Training a competitive ASR model realistically needs your own GPU compute.
- No hosted model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) may touch competition data. Hosted coding assistants are allowed only if you disclose no competition data or derived non-public material to them, so don't paste dev or test data into Claude or ChatGPT.