---
description: "Essential concepts for audio data curation including ASR inference, quality assessment, and speech processing workflows"
categories: ["concepts-architecture"]
tags: ["concepts", "audio-curation", "asr", "speech-processing", "quality-metrics"]
personas: ["data-scientist-focused", "mle-focused"]
difficulty: "beginner"
content_type: "concept"
modality: "audio-only"
---

# Audio Curation Concepts

This guide covers the essential concepts for audio data curation in NVIDIA NeMo Curator. These concepts assume basic familiarity with speech processing and machine learning principles.

## Core Concept Areas

Audio curation in NVIDIA NeMo Curator focuses on these key areas:

<Cards>

<Card title="Audio Curation Pipeline" href="/about/concepts/audio/curation-pipeline">

Modality-level overview of ingest, validation, optional ASR, metrics, filtering, and export
overview map
</Card>

<Card title="AudioTask Structure" href="/about/concepts/audio/audio-task">

Understanding the AudioTask data structure and audio file management
data-structures validation
</Card>

<Card title="ASR Pipeline" href="/about/concepts/audio/asr-pipeline">

Comprehensive overview of the automatic speech recognition pipeline and workflow
overview architecture
</Card>

<Card title="Quality Metrics" href="/about/concepts/audio/quality-metrics">

Core concepts for evaluating speech transcription quality and audio characteristics
wer cer metrics
</Card>

<Card title="Dataset Manifests and Ingest" href="/about/concepts/audio/manifests-ingest">

Concepts for constructing manifests and ingesting audio datasets
manifests ingest
</Card>

<Card title="ALM Pipeline" href="/about/concepts/audio/alm-pipeline">

Audio Language Model data curation pipeline for extracting training windows from diarized segments
alm windowing speaker-diarization
</Card>

<Card title="Text Integration" href="/about/concepts/audio/text-integration">

Concepts for integrating audio processing with text curation workflows
multimodal integration
</Card>

</Cards>

## Infrastructure Components

The audio curation concepts build on NVIDIA NeMo Curator's core infrastructure components, which are shared across all modalities. These components include:

<Cards>

<Card title="Memory Management" href="/reference/infra/memory-management">
Optimize memory usage when processing large audio datasets
partitioning
batching
monitoring
</Card>

<Card title="GPU Acceleration" href="/reference/infra/gpu-processing">
Leverage NVIDIA GPUs for faster ASR inference and audio processing
cuda
nemo-toolkit
performance
</Card>

<Card title="Resumable Processing" href="/reference/infra/resumable-processing">
Continue interrupted operations across large audio datasets
checkpoints
recovery
batching
</Card>

</Cards>
