WAXAL: A large-scale open resource for African language speech technology

Google Research · 5 months ago · 22

Google Research released WAXAL, an open-access speech dataset covering 27 Sub-Saharan African languages spoken by over 100 million people. The dataset includes approximately 1,846 hours of transcribed speech for automatic speech recognition and over 565 hours of high-fidelity audio for text-to-speech synthesis, developed in collaboration with African academic institutions. The resource aims to enable development of voice-enabled technologies in African languages that have previously lacked sufficient training data.