diff --git a/.github/workflows/build-docs.yml b/.github/workflows/build-docs.yml
index 45f9e80941ab..29cc50e72b85 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/build-docs.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/build-docs.yml
@@ -21,12 +21,14 @@ on:
       - r**
     paths:
       - "docs/**"
+      - ".github/workflows/build-docs.yml"
   push:
     branches:
       - main
       - r**
     paths:
       - "docs/**"
+      - ".github/workflows/build-docs.yml"
 
 concurrency:
   group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.event.pull_request.number || github.ref }}-${{ github.event.label.name || 'main' }}-${{ github.event_name }}
@@ -42,7 +44,8 @@ jobs:
     uses: NVIDIA-NeMo/FW-CI-templates/.github/workflows/_build_docs.yml@v0.80.2
     with:
       docs-directory: docs/source
-      sync-all: true
+      sync-all: false
+      requirements-file: requirements/requirements_docs_ci.txt
 
   build-docs-summary:
     needs: [pre-flight, build-docs]
diff --git a/docs/source/asr/datasets.rst b/docs/source/asr/datasets.rst
index edf4205fd78a..69c0083b2bc7 100644
--- a/docs/source/asr/datasets.rst
+++ b/docs/source/asr/datasets.rst
@@ -1067,7 +1067,7 @@ One such example are attention encoder-decoder models, where the overall GPU mem
 into two main components: input-sequence-length bound (encoder activations) and output-sequence-length bound
 (decoder activations).
 Classical bucketing techniques only stratify on the input sequence length (e.g. duration in speech),
-which leverages encoder effectively but leads to excessive padding on on decoder's side.
+which leverages encoder effectively but leads to excessive padding on decoder's side.
 
 To amend this we support a 2D bucketing technique which estimates the buckets in two stages.
 The first stage is identical to 1D bucketing, i.e. we determine the input-sequence bucket bins so that
diff --git a/docs/source/conf.py b/docs/source/conf.py
index 54d112cfed36..27db0419e343 100644
--- a/docs/source/conf.py
+++ b/docs/source/conf.py
@@ -73,7 +73,8 @@
 _skipped_autodoc_mock_imports = ['wrapt', 'numpy']
 
 for req_path in sorted(list(glob.glob("../../requirements/*.txt"))):
-    if "docs.txt" in req_path:
+    # NB: mocking `coverage` from test requirements results in error with `numba`
+    if "docs.txt" in req_path or "test.txt" in req_path:
         continue
 
     req_file = os.path.abspath(os.path.expanduser(req_path))
diff --git a/requirements/requirements_docs.txt b/requirements/requirements_docs.txt
index ff3ec5202b0e..2033edfc5161 100644
--- a/requirements/requirements_docs.txt
+++ b/requirements/requirements_docs.txt
@@ -3,10 +3,15 @@ Jinja2
 latexcodec
 numpy
 pydata-sphinx-theme
-Sphinx
+sphinx>=8.1.3
 sphinx-book-theme
-sphinx-copybutton
+sphinx-copybutton>=0.5.2
 sphinxcontrib-bibtex
 sphinxext-opengraph
+sphinx-autobuild>=2024.10.3
+sphinx-autodoc2>=0.5.0
+sphinxcontrib-mermaid
 urllib3
 wrapt
+myst-parser>=4.0.1
+nvidia-sphinx-theme>=0.0.8
diff --git a/requirements/requirements_docs_ci.txt b/requirements/requirements_docs_ci.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..a024d0c9c8f8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/requirements/requirements_docs_ci.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+# requirements for building docs on CI
+-r requirements.txt
+-r requirements_asr.txt
+-r requirements_audio.txt
+-r requirements_common.txt
+-r requirements_docs.txt
+-r requirements_lightning.txt
+-r requirements_run.txt
+-r requirements_slu.txt
+-r requirements_tts.txt
+-r requirements_cu12.txt
+
+# excluded requirements:
+# -r requirements_cu13.txt
+# -r requirements_test.txt