  We present ArTST, a pre-trained Arabic text and speech transformer for
supporting open-source speech technologies for the Arabic language. The model
architecture follows the unified-modal framework, SpeechT5, that was recently
released for English, and is focused on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), with
plans to extend the model for dialectal and code-switched Arabic in future
editions. We pre-trained the model from scratch on MSA speech and text data,
and fine-tuned it for the following tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR),
Text-To-Speech synthesis (TTS), and spoken dialect identification. In our
experiments comparing ArTST with SpeechT5, as well as with previously reported
results in these tasks, ArTST performs on a par with or exceeding the current
state-of-the-art in all three tasks. Moreover, we find that our pre-training is
conducive for generalization, which is particularly evident in the low-resource
TTS task. The pre-trained model as well as the fine-tuned ASR and TTS models
are released for research use.
