mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Building African Voices

arXiv 2207.00688 ↗First posted 1 Jul 2022cs.CL cs.SD eess.AScited by 14

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Abstract (arXiv)

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 low-resourced African languages, from corpus creation to sharing and deploying the Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. We first create a set of general-purpose instructions on building speech synthesis systems with minimum technological resources and subject-matter expertise. Next, we create new datasets and curate datasets from "found" data (existing recordings) through a participatory approach while considering accessibility, quality, and breadth. We demonstrate that we can develop synthesizers that generate intelligible speech with 25 minutes of created speech, even when recorded in suboptimal environments. Finally, we release the speech data, code, and trained voices for 12 African languages to support researchers and developers.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 6 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2022.

Builds on

6 of 35 references.

References · 6

  1. 2019Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpuscited by 1,384
  2. 2017Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictionscited by 804
  3. 2020Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languagescited by 159
  4. 2021SynthASR: Unlocking Synthetic Data for Speech Recognitioncited by 34
  5. 2018Semi-Supervised Training for Improving Data Efficiency in End-to-End Speech Synthesiscited by 30
  6. 2021RyanSpeech: A Corpus for Conversational Text-to-Speech Synthesiscited by 10

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 3; 2023: 5; 2024: 4; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.

14 papers.

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  1. 2023AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASRcited by 35
  2. 2023Improving Massively Multilingual ASR With Auxiliary CTC Objectivescited by 31
  3. 2023MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languagescited by 23
  4. 2022Virtuoso: Massive Multilingual Speech-Text Joint Semi-Supervised Learning for Text-To-Speechcited by 15
  5. 2024Meta Learning Text-to-Speech Synthesis in over 7000 Languagescited by 9
  6. 20241000 African Voices: Advancing inclusive multi-speaker multi-accent speech synthesiscited by 9
  7. 2022When Is TTS Augmentation Through a Pivot Language Useful?cited by 8
  8. 2022YFACC: A Yor`ub'a speech-image dataset for cross-lingual keyword localisation through visual groundingcited by 8
  9. 2023AfriNames: Most ASR models "butcher" African Namescited by 7
  10. 2024Cultural Fidelity in Large-Language Models: An Evaluation of Online Language Resources as a Driver of Model Performance in Value Representationcited by 7
  11. 2023Visually Grounded Keyword Detection and Localisation for Low-Resource Languagescited by 2
  12. 2026Towards Digital Preservation of Efik: TTS for a Low-Resource African Languagecited by 1
2 more
  1. 2024Improved Visually Prompted Keyword Localisation in Real Low-Resource Settingscited by 0
  2. 2025Kinship in Speech: Leveraging Linguistic Relatedness for Zero-Shot TTS in Indian Languagescited by 0