Papers › Building African Voices
Building African Voices
Perez Ogayo, Graham Neubig, Alan W Black
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.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections