Related papers: WAXAL: A Large-Scale Multilingual African Language…

ASR has achieved remarkable global progress, yet African low-resource languages remain rigorously underrepresented, producing barriers to digital inclusion across the continent with more than +2000 languages. This systematic literature…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performs well for high-resource languages with abundant paired audio-transcript data, but its accuracy degrades sharply for most languages due to limited publicly available aligned data. To this end, we…

Creating spoken dialogue datasets is methodologically challenging, and these challenges are amplified when the goal is to build multilingual, multi-parallel datasets at scale. This work introduces HEALTHDIAL, a large-scale, multilingual,…

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…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…

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…

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…

Modern speech synthesis techniques can produce natural-sounding speech given sufficient high-quality data and compute resources. However, such data is not readily available for many languages. This paper focuses on speech synthesis for…

We present a novel Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset for the Oromo language, a widely spoken language in Ethiopia and neighboring regions. The dataset was collected through a crowd-sourcing initiative, encompassing a diverse range…

Africa has a very low doctor-to-patient ratio. At very busy clinics, doctors could see 30+ patients per day -- a heavy patient burden compared with developed countries -- but productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition…

We introduce the largest transcribed Arabic speech corpus, QASR, collected from the broadcast domain. This multi-dialect speech dataset contains 2,000 hours of speech sampled at 16kHz crawled from Aljazeera news channel. The dataset is…

Despite significant advances in speech processing, Portuguese remains under-resourced due to the scarcity of public, large-scale, and high-quality datasets. To address this gap, we present a new dataset, named TAGARELA, composed of over…

Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark…

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…

Speech technology remains out of reach for most of the over 2300 languages in Africa. We present the first systematic assessment of large-scale synthetic voice corpora for African ASR. We apply a three-step process: LLM-driven text…

Recently, multilingual artificial intelligence assistants, exemplified by ChatGPT, have gained immense popularity. As a crucial gateway to human-computer interaction, multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) has also garnered…

We present the Thiomi Dataset, a large-scale multimodal corpus spanning ten African languages across four language families: Swahili, Kikuyu, Kamba, Kimeru, Luo, Maasai, Kipsigis, Somali (East Africa); Wolof (West Africa); and Fulani…

This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in seven South…

Dialectal Arabic (DA) speech data vary widely in domain coverage, dialect labeling practices, and recording conditions, complicating cross-dataset comparison and model evaluation. To characterize this landscape, we conduct a computational…

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…