# AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00274 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00274/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [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)
- [SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04624/) (2021)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [vq-wav2vec: Self-Supervised Learning of Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05453/) (2019)
- [TED-LIUM 3: twice as much data and corpus repartition for experiments on speaker adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04699/) (2018)
- [VoxLingua107: a Dataset for Spoken Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12998/) (2020)
- [Performance-Efficiency Trade-offs in Unsupervised Pre-training for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06870/) (2021)
- [Towards Building ASR Systems for the Next Billion Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03945/) (2021)
- [Domain Adversarial Training for Accented Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02786/) (2018)
- [The Edinburgh International Accents of English Corpus: Towards the Democratization of English ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18110/) (2023)
- [Best of Both Worlds: Robust Accented Speech Recognition with Adversarial Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05834/) (2021)
- [AI4D -- African Language Program](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02516/) (2021)
- [Prompt Tuning for Discriminative Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11166/) (2022)
- [Robust Prediction of Punctuation and Truecasing for Medical ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02025/) (2020)
- [Using Radio Archives for Low-Resource Speech Recognition: Towards an Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Illiterate Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13083/) (2021)
- [Building African Voices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00688/) (2022)
- [OkwuGb'e: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07762/) (2021)
- [Accent-Robust Automatic Speech Recognition Using Supervised and Unsupervised Wav2vec Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03520/) (2021)
- [AIPNet: Generative Adversarial Pre-training of Accent-invariant Networks for End-to-end Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11935/) (2019)
- [YFACC: A Yor`ub'a speech-image dataset for cross-lingual keyword localisation through visual grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04600/) (2022)
- [Learning Nigerian accent embeddings from speech: preliminary results based on SautiDB-Naija corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06199/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15640/) (2024)
- [Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04527/) (2024)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [Afrispeech-Dialog: A Benchmark Dataset for Spontaneous English Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03945/) (2025)
- [1000 African Voices: Advancing inclusive multi-speaker multi-accent speech synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11727/) (2024)
- [Africa-Centric Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Multilingual Speech Representation in a Sub-Saharan Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02000/) (2024)
- [Hallucination Benchmark for Speech Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16567/) (2025)
- [Performant ASR Models for Medical Entities in Accented Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12387/) (2024)
- [MultiMed: Multilingual Medical Speech Recognition via Attention Encoder Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14074/) (2024)
- [State of NLP in Kenya: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09948/) (2024)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11690/) (2025)
- [BERSting at the Screams: A Benchmark for Distanced, Emotional and Shouted Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00059/) (2025)
- [The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15916/) (2025)
- [Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18436/) (2025)
- [Swivuriso: The South African Next Voices Multilingual Speech Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02201/) (2025)
- [What Do Prosody and Text Convey? Characterizing How Meaningful Information is Distributed Across Multiple Channels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16832/) (2025)
- [Non-autoregressive real-time Accent Conversion model with voice cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13162/) (2024)
- [RideKE: Leveraging Low-Resource, User-Generated Twitter Content for Sentiment and Emotion Detection in Kenyan Code-Switched Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06180/) (2025)
- [Domain-Aware Speaker Diarization On African-Accented English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21554/) (2025)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for African Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01145/) (2025)
- [Culture Cartography: Mapping the Landscape of Cultural Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27672/) (2025)
- [Brilla AI: AI Contestant for the National Science and Maths Quiz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01699/) (2024)
- [Towards Open-Ended Discovery for Low-Resource NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01220/) (2025)
- [Pseudo2Real: Task Arithmetic for Pseudo-Label Correction in Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08047/) (2025)
- [WorldSpeech: A Multilingual Speech Corpus from Around the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09167/) (2026)
- [WAXAL-NET: Finetuned Edge ASR Across 19 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02375/) (2026)
- [Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbr"ucken Dialect Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11803/) (2026)
- [AfriVox-v2: A Domain-Verticalized Benchmark for In-the-Wild African Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03590/) (2026)
- [Sometin Beta Pass Notin: Improving Multilingual ASR for Nigerian Languages via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17710/) (2026)
- [DONDO: Open w2v-BERT Speech-Recognition Base Models for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21540/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Africa has a very low doctor-to-patient ratio. At very busy clinics, doctors could see 30+ patients per day -- a heavy patient burden compared with developed countries -- but productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are lacking for these overworked clinicians. However, clinical ASR is mature, even ubiquitous, in developed nations, and clinician-reported performance of commercial clinical ASR systems is generally satisfactory. Furthermore, the recent performance of general domain ASR is approaching human accuracy. However, several gaps exist. Several publications have highlighted racial bias with speech-to-text algorithms and performance on minority accents lags significantly. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available research or benchmark on accented African clinical ASR, and speech data is non-existent for the majority of African accents. We release AfriSpeech, 200hrs of Pan-African English speech, 67,577 clips from 2,463 unique speakers across 120 indigenous accents from 13 countries for clinical and general domain ASR, a benchmark test set, with publicly available pre-trained models with SOTA performance on the AfriSpeech benchmark.