We are delighted to confirm that our Senior Research Fellow Professor Aditi Lahiri, co-founder of Oxford’s Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, has been awarded a third Proof of Concept Grant by the European Research Council (ERC).
The €150,000 grant will support the FLEX-CODESWITCH project, which aims to develop a speech-recognition system that can cope with the way multilingual speakers switch between languages in conversation. The award is notable for being the third ERC Proof of Concept Grant that Professor Lahiri has received during her stellar research career, and the sixth ERC Grant overall.
The FLEX-CODESWITCH project will build on Professor Lahiri’s existing research to address the fact that most automatic speech-recognition systems are designed for English and trained on thousands of hours of single-language recordings. These systems perform poorly when speakers “code-switch” between two or more languages within a conversation.
Professor Lahiri and her team at Oxford have built a single-word recognition system, FlexSR, based on linguistic principles rather than large volumes of training data, that can mitigate the code-switching issue. FlexSR can be adapted across Germanic languages and different accents by changing how words are represented, without the need for additional training, and currently works in Dutch, English and German. The complete system, including its word corpora, is smaller than 10MB, so it can run locally on a device such as a mobile phone without an internet connection.
Professor Lahiri
PROFESSOR LAHIRI said: ‘Many people speak more than one language and often swap between them during conversations instinctively. Increasingly, industries like banking are using AI for speech recognition, which struggles to cope with this widespread phenomenon.
‘Current AI speech recognition systems use massive amounts of data, and cannot deal with regional variations, such as different accents and words, let alone switching between languages. People, however, are great at this and FlexSR is modelled on how people actually recognise language in a way that current AI systems cannot.
‘The benefits of this technology to society are that it is easier and cheaper for industrial and other sectors to use it compared to current AI. This is because FlexSR requires less data, less storage and less computational power to run making it very flexible. FlexSR doesn’t need retraining to handle different languages and can be used from a hand-held device like a mobile phone for internet banking. It will become a very useful tool for a wide variety of users.’
The Proof of Concept funding will allow the team to develop FlexSR further, drawing on linguistic information from Professor Lahiri’s current ERC Synergy project, PAAL (Phonological cognisance and allied linguistic representations: acquisition, bilingualism, change and script). The team will focus on Bengali, Hindi and English, with code-switching and accent variation across the three, extending its transcription-verification system and building a short-phrase command and query tool, initially aimed at the banking and multimedia sectors.
ERC Proof of Concept Grants help current and recent ERC grantees explore the commercial or societal potential of their research findings. Each grant is worth €150,000. In this first 2026 round, the ERC awarded grants to 182 researchers, with total funding of €27.3 million, selected from 554 proposals. The scheme is part of Horizon Europe, the EU’s research and innovation programme.
Further information is available on the ERC’s website here.
Republished with thanks to the University of Oxford. For more information, contact news.office@admin.ox.ac.uk
Professor Irene Tracey, Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Professor Aditi Lahiri; Professor Maria Leptin, President of the ERC; and Catherine Royle, Principal of Somerville College, March 2026