Related papers: Hello Afrika: Speech Commands in Kinyarwanda

The proposed model aims to develop a speech recognition technology for hearing, speech, or cognitively disabled people. All the available technology in the field of speech recognition doesn't come with an interface for communication for…

For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In…

In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. We introduce MMTAfrica, the first…

In the last 5 years, the availability of large audio datasets in African countries has opened unlimited opportunities to build machine intelligence (MI) technologies that are closer to the people and speak, learn, understand, and do…

Child literacy is a strong predictor of life outcomes at the subsequent stages of an individual's life. This points to a need for targeted interventions in vulnerable low and middle income populations to help bridge the gap between literacy…

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality…

Despite recent progress in multilingual speech processing, African languages remain under-represented in both research and deployed systems, particularly when it comes to strong, open-weight encoders that transfer well under low-resource…

Describes an audio dataset of spoken words designed to help train and evaluate keyword spotting systems. Discusses why this task is an interesting challenge, and why it requires a specialized dataset that is different from conventional…

Interactions based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) have become widely used, with speech input being increasingly utilized to create documents. However, as there is no easy way to distinguish between commands being issued and text…

This study examines the digital representation of African languages and the challenges this presents for current language detection tools. We evaluate their performance on Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, and Amharic. While these languages are spoken…

BibleTTS is a large, high-quality, open speech dataset for ten languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa. The corpus contains up to 86 hours of aligned, studio quality 48kHz single speaker recordings per language, enabling the development of…

Many personal devices have transitioned from visual-controlled interfaces to speech-controlled interfaces to reduce device costs and interactive friction. This transition has been hastened by the increasing capabilities of speech-controlled…

In an era of human-computer interaction with increasingly agentic AI systems capable of connecting with users conversationally, speech is an important modality for commanding agents. By recognizing and using speech emotions (i.e., how a…

Bengali is one of the most spoken languages in the world with over 300 million speakers globally. Despite its popularity, research into the development of Bengali speech recognition systems is hindered due to the lack of diverse open-source…

Recent advances in speech-enabled AI, including Google's NotebookLM and OpenAI's speech-to-speech API, are driving widespread interest in voice interfaces globally. Despite this momentum, there exists no publicly available…

Speech is becoming increasingly popular as an interface modality, especially in hands- and eyes-busy situations where the use of a keyboard or mouse is difficult. However, despite the fact that many have hailed speech as being inherently…

Voice controlled virtual assistants (VAs) are now available in smartphones, cars, and standalone devices in homes. In most cases, the user needs to first "wake-up" the VA by saying a particular word/phrase every time he or she wants the VA…

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…

Voice assistants have become an essential tool for people with various disabilities because they enable complex phone- or tablet-based interactions without the need for fine-grained motor control, such as with touchscreens. However, these…

Stopwords are fundamental in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for information retrieval. One of the common tasks in preprocessing of text data is the removal of stopwords. Currently, while high-resource languages like English…