# Zambezi Voice: A Multilingual Speech Corpus for Zambian Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04428 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04428/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13979/) (2020)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [pyannote.audio: neural building blocks for speaker diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01255/) (2019)
- [fairseq S2T: Fast Speech-to-Text Modeling with fairseq](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05171/) (2020)
- [End-to-end speaker segmentation for overlap-aware resegmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04045/) (2021)
- [Using Radio Archives for Low-Resource Speech Recognition: Towards an Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Illiterate Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13083/) (2021)
- [BembaSpeech: A Speech Recognition Corpus for the Bemba Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04889/) (2021)
- [Speech Resources in the Tamasheq Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05051/) (2022)
- [BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17202/) (2023)
- [The Makerere Radio Speech Corpus: A Luganda Radio Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09790/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representation model for African languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20201/) (2024)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [Meta Learning Text-to-Speech Synthesis in over 7000 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06403/) (2024)
- [Joint Prediction and Denoising for Large-scale Multilingual Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15317/) (2023)
- [Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18436/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Voice Data for Automatic Speech Recognition in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17578/) (2025)
- [Self-supervised Adaptive Pre-training of Multilingual Speech Models for Language and Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07338/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Multilingual Speech Recognition through Language Prompt Tuning and Frame-Level Language Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09443/) (2023)
- [GMTR: Graph Matching Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08141/) (2023)
- [DarkShot: Lighting Dark Images with Low-Compute and High-Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16805/) (2023)
- [TRLS: A Time Series Representation Learning Framework via Spectrogram for Medical Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05431/) (2024)
- [TEN-GUARD: Tensor Decomposition for Backdoor Attack Detection in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05432/) (2024)
- [T-Pixel2Mesh: Combining Global and Local Transformer for 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13663/) (2024)
- [Strategic Arms with Side Communication Prevail Over Low-Regret MAB Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17101/) (2024)
- [Towards General Deepfake Detection with Dynamic Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11162/) (2024)
- [Attr-Int: A Simple and Effective Entity Alignment Framework for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13409/) (2024)
- [AMPS: ASR with Multimodal Paraphrase Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18368/) (2024)
- [Mask6D: Masked Pose Priors For 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06486/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work introduces Zambezi Voice, an open-source multilingual speech resource for Zambian languages. It contains two collections of datasets: unlabelled audio recordings of radio news and talk shows programs (160 hours) and labelled data (over 80 hours) consisting of read speech recorded from text sourced from publicly available literature books. The dataset is created for speech recognition but can be extended to multilingual speech processing research for both supervised and unsupervised learning approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first multilingual speech dataset created for Zambian languages. We exploit pretraining and cross-lingual transfer learning by finetuning the Wav2Vec2.0 large-scale multilingual pre-trained model to build end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition models for our baseline models. The dataset is released publicly under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and can be accessed via https://github.com/unza-speech-lab/zambezi-voice .