Related papers: AfriVoices-KE: A Multilingual Speech Dataset for K…

The lack of impaired speech data hinders advancements in the development of inclusive speech technologies, particularly in low-resource languages such as Akan. To address this gap, this study presents a curated corpus of speech samples from…

As speech generation technology advances, the risk of misuse through deepfake audio has become a pressing concern, which underscores the critical need for robust detection systems. However, many existing speech deepfake datasets are limited…

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…

Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of…

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…

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…

Deepfake audio detection is challenging for low-resource languages like Bengali due to limited datasets and subtle acoustic features. To address this, we introduce BangalFake, a Bengali Deepfake Audio Dataset with 12,260 real and 13,260…

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…

Voice or Speech Commands are a subset of the broader Spoken Word Corpus of a language which are essential for non-contact control of and activation of larger AI systems in devices used in everyday life especially for persons with…

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…

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…

We present the first self-supervised multilingual speech model trained exclusively on African speech. The model learned from nearly 60 000 hours of unlabeled speech segments in 21 languages and dialects spoken in sub-Saharan Africa. On the…

In this paper, we introduce the Akan Conversation Emotion (ACE) dataset, the first multimodal emotion dialogue dataset for an African language, addressing the significant lack of resources for low-resource languages in emotion recognition…

In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 covered 16 African languages, we expand this to 1,226 through continued…

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…

Multimodal AI research has overwhelmingly focused on high-resource languages, hindering the democratization of advancements in the field. To address this, we present AfriCaption, a comprehensive framework for multilingual image captioning…

Stereotype repositories are critical to assess generative AI model safety, but currently lack adequate global coverage. It is imperative to prioritize targeted expansion, strategically addressing existing deficits, over merely increasing…

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…

Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages…

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…