Related papers: Hello Afrika: Speech Commands in Kinyarwanda

Africa's rich linguistic diversity remains significantly underrepresented in speech technologies, creating barriers to digital inclusion. To alleviate this challenge, we systematically map the continent's speech space of datasets and…

Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…

Despite recent availability of large transcribed Kinyarwanda speech data, achieving robust speech recognition for Kinyarwanda is still challenging. In this work, we show that using self-supervised pre-training, following a simple curriculum…

Through this paper, we seek to reduce the communication barrier between the hearing-impaired community and the larger society who are usually not familiar with sign language in the sub-Saharan region of Africa with the largest occurrences…

Automatic voice-controlled systems have changed the way humans interact with a computer. Voice or speech recognition systems allow a user to make a hands-free request to the computer, which in turn processes the request and serves the user…

AfriVoices-KE is a large-scale multilingual speech dataset comprising approximately 3,000 hours of audio across five Kenyan languages: Dholuo, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Maasai, and Somali. The dataset includes 750 hours of scripted speech and 2,250…

The development of high-performing, robust, and reliable speech technologies depends on large, high-quality datasets. However, African languages -- including our focus, Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba -- remain under-represented due to insufficient…

This paper presents exploration of speech enable operating systems, software, and applications. It begins with a description of how such systems work, and the level of accuracy that can be expected. It explains the applications of speech…

The advancement of speech technologies has been remarkable, yet its integration with African languages remains limited due to the scarcity of African speech corpora. To address this issue, we present AfroDigits, a minimalist,…

This paper introduces a new prototype system for controlling a PC by head movements and also with voice commands. Our system is a multimodal interface concerned with controlling the computer. The selected modes of interaction are speech and…

Natural Language Processing is a crucial frontier in artificial intelligence, with broad applications in many areas, including public health, agriculture, education, and commerce. However, due to the lack of substantial linguistic…

Unlike major Western languages, most African languages are very low-resourced. Furthermore, the resources that do exist are often scattered and difficult to obtain and discover. As a result, the data and code for existing research has…

Keyboard, although a popular medium, is not very convenient as it requires a certain amount of skill for effective usage. A mouse on the other hand requires a good hand-eye co-ordination. Also current computer interfaces also assume a…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study…

The development of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for low-resource African languages remains challenging due to limited transcribed speech data. While recent advances in large multilingual models like OpenAI's Whisper offer…

Spoken keyword spotting (KWS) is the task of identifying a keyword in an audio stream and is widely used in smart devices at the edge in order to activate voice assistants and perform hands-free tasks. The task is daunting as there is a…

Building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is a challenging task, especially for under-resourced languages that need to construct corpora nearly from scratch and lack sufficient training data. It has emerged that several African…

Recent advancements in the field of computer vision with the help of deep neural networks have led us to explore and develop many existing challenges that were once unattended due to the lack of necessary technologies. Hand Sign/Gesture…

Speech recognition is a fascinating process that offers the opportunity to interact and command the machine in the field of human-computer interactions. Speech recognition is a language-dependent system constructed directly based on the…

African languages are numerous, complex and low-resourced. The datasets required for machine translation are difficult to discover, and existing research is hard to reproduce. Minimal attention has been given to machine translation for…