# 1000 African Voices: Advancing inclusive multi-speaker multi-accent speech synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11727 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11727/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [YourTTS: Towards Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS and Zero-Shot Voice Conversion for everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02418/) (2021)
- [VoiceFixer: Toward General Speech Restoration with Neural Vocoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13731/) (2021)
- [HiFi++: a Unified Framework for Bandwidth Extension and Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13086/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Based Assessment of Synthetic Speech Naturalness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11673/) (2021)
- [AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00274/) (2023)
- [BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03546/) (2022)
- [NeMo Inverse Text Normalization: From Development To Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05055/) (2021)
- [Building African Voices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00688/) (2022)
- [Can we use Common Voice to train a Multi-Speaker TTS system?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06370/) (2022)
- [AccentFold: A Journey through African Accents for Zero-Shot ASR Adaptation to Target Accents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01152/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Multiaccented Multispeaker TTS with RADTTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10335/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [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)
- [State of NLP in Kenya: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09948/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Synthetic Voice Data for Automatic Speech Recognition in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17578/) (2025)
- [A Cross Community Agenda for Speech AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13168/) (2026)
- [Towards participatory speech dataset curation: A queer case study and conceptual framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25496/) (2026)
- [ELARSpeech: A 30K-Hour Dataset Across 675 Underrepresented Languages for Long-Tail Multilingual Speech Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19388/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 sourced from data-rich geographies with personas representative of their source data. Although 3000 of the world's languages are domiciled in Africa, African voices and personas are under-represented in these systems. As speech synthesis becomes increasingly democratized, it is desirable to increase the representation of African English accents. We present Afro-TTS, the first pan-African accented English speech synthesis system able to generate speech in 86 African accents, with 1000 personas representing the rich phonological diversity across the continent for downstream application in Education, Public Health, and Automated Content Creation. Speaker interpolation retains naturalness and accentedness, enabling the creation of new voices.