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

Speech translation for low-resource languages remains fundamentally limited by the scarcity of high-quality, diverse parallel speech data, a challenge that is especially pronounced in African linguistic contexts. To address this, we…

Although over 300M around the world speak Bangla, scant work has been done in improving Bangla voice-to-text transcription due to Bangla being a low-resource language. However, with the introduction of the Bengali Common Voice 9.0 speech…

The SAFE Challenge evaluates synthetic speech detection across three tasks: unmodified audio, processed audio with compression artifacts, and laundered audio designed to evade detection. We systematically explore self-supervised learning…

Everyday speech conveys far more than words, it reflects who we are, how we feel, and the circumstances surrounding our interactions. Yet, most existing speech datasets are acted, limited in scale, and fail to capture the expressive…

Inspired by humans comprehending speech in a multi-modal manner, various audio-visual datasets have been constructed. However, most existing datasets focus on English, induce dependencies with various prediction models during dataset…

This study focuses on the creation of the KazEmoTTS dataset, designed for emotional Kazakh text-to-speech (TTS) applications. KazEmoTTS is a collection of 54,760 audio-text pairs, with a total duration of 74.85 hours, featuring 34.23 hours…

This paper introduces Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) dataset, a large multilingual corpus suitable for speech research. The dataset is derived from read audiobooks from LibriVox and consists of 8 languages, including about 44.5K hours of…

Recent methods in speech and language technology pretrain very LARGE models which are fine-tuned for specific tasks. However, the benefits of such LARGE models are often limited to a few resource rich languages of the world. In this work,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs,…

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…

FLEURS offers n-way parallel speech for 100+ languages, but Northern Kurdish is not one of them, which limits benchmarking for automatic speech recognition and speech translation tasks in this language. We present FLEURS-Kobani, a Northern…

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) acquire valuable, generalizable linguistic information during pretraining and have advanced the state of the art on task-specific finetuning. To date, only ~31 out of ~2,000 African languages…

We introduce FLEURS, the Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech benchmark. FLEURS is an n-way parallel speech dataset in 102 languages built on top of the machine translation FLoRes-101 benchmark, with…

Current AI models often fail to account for local context and language, given the predominance of English and Western internet content in their training data. This hinders the global relevance, usefulness, and safety of these models as they…

Under-resourced languages, such as Quechuas, face data and resource scarcity, hindering their development in speech technology. To address this issue, Common Voice presents a crucial opportunity to foster an open and community-driven speech…

African languages remain underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP), with most corpora limited to formal registers that fail to capture the vibrancy of everyday communication. This work addresses this gap for Shona, a Bantu…

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…

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…

The growing prevalence of speech deepfakes has raised serious concerns, particularly in real-world scenarios such as telephone fraud and identity theft. While many anti-spoofing systems have demonstrated promising performance on…

Although numerous datasets have been developed to support dialogue systems, most existing chit-chat datasets overlook the cultural nuances inherent in natural human conversations. To address this gap, we introduce SEADialogues, a culturally…