相关论文: Hello Afrika: Speech Commands in Kinyarwanda

We investigate the emergent abilities of the recently proposed web-scale speech model Whisper, by adapting it to unseen tasks with prompt engineering. We selected three tasks: audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), code-switched speech…

Useful conversational agents must accurately capture named entities to minimize error for downstream tasks, for example, asking a voice assistant to play a track from a certain artist, initiating navigation to a specific location, or…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…

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…

Small and medium sized businesses often struggle with data driven decision making do to a lack of advanced analytics tools, especially in African countries where they make up a majority of the workforce. Though many tools exist they are not…

Recent advancements in technology have necessitated a paradigm shift in the people use technology necessitating a new research field called Human-Machine collaboration. ChatGPT, an Artificial intelligence (AI) assistive technology, has…

The main purpose of a voice command system is to process a sentence in natural language and perform the corresponding action. Although there exist many approaches to map sentences to API (application programming interface) calls, this…

This paper explores the application of artificial intelligence techniques in audio and voice processing, focusing on the integration of wake words and speaker recognition for secure access in embedded systems. With the growing prevalence of…

Indigenous African languages are categorized as under-served in Natural Language Processing. They therefore experience poor digital inclusivity and information access. The processing challenge with such languages has been how to use machine…

Searching for an available, reliable, official, and understandable information is not a trivial task due to scattered information across the internet, and the availability lack of governmental communication channels communicating with…

Recent advances in speech synthesis have enabled many useful applications like audio directions in Google Maps, screen readers, and automated content generation on platforms like TikTok. However, these systems are mostly dominated by voices…

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…

In this information technology age, a convenient and user friendly interface is required to operate the computer system on very fast rate. In the human being, speech being a natural mode of communication has potential to being a fast and…

We present our first efforts in building an automatic speech recognition system for Somali, an under-resourced language, using 1.57 hrs of annotated speech for acoustic model training. The system is part of an ongoing effort by the United…

This software project based paper is for a vision of the near future in which computer interaction is characterized by natural face-to-face conversations with lifelike characters that speak, emote, and gesture. The first step is speech. The…

The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly…

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…

The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be…

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…

In general, self help systems are being increasingly deployed by service based industries because they are capable of delivering better customer service and increasingly the switch is to voice based self help systems because they provide a…