# Swivuriso: The South African Next Voices Multilingual Speech Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02201/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2025.

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

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [The People's Speech: A Large-Scale Diverse English Speech Recognition Dataset for Commercial Usage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09344/) (2021)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition using Advanced Deep Learning Approaches: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01255/) (2024)
- [AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00274/) (2023)
- [Investigation of Whisper ASR Hallucinations Induced by Non-Speech Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11378/) (2025)
- [MediaSpeech: Multilanguage ASR Benchmark and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16193/) (2021)
- [Massively Multilingual ASR on 70 Languages: Tokenization, Architecture, and Generalization Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05756/) (2022)
- [Correcting FLORES Evaluation Dataset for Four African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00626/) (2024)
- [Preparing the Vuk'uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03750/) (2023)
- [Enabling ASR for Low-Resource Languages: A Comprehensive Dataset Creation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01446/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Development of ASR Systems for Multilingual Code-switched Speech in Under-resourced Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03135/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Speech Representations Still Struggle with African American Vernacular English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14262/) (2024)
- [The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15916/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Sequential Adapter Stacking for Cross-Lingual Low-Resource ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15758/) (2026)
- [Tone-Conditioned Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Bantu Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31642/) (2026)
- [From Monolingual to Multilingual: Evaluating Mamba for ASR in South African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01502/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in seven South African languages. Covering agriculture, healthcare, and general domain topics, Swivuriso addresses significant gaps in existing ASR datasets. We describe the design principles, ethical considerations, and data collection procedures that guided the dataset creation. We present baseline results of training/finetuning ASR models with this data and compare to other ASR datasets for the langauges concerned.