Say what? Google’s WAXAL dataset includes these 21 African languages

Google’s new WAXAL dataset is expected to bridge a critical digital divide for over 100 million speakers. Picture: Google Google’s new WAXAL dataset is expected to bridge a critical digital divide for over 100 million speakers by providing foundational data for 21 Sub-Saharan African languages, including Shona, Luganda, Yoruba, and Swahili. The search giant and a consortium of leading African research institutions announced the launch of WAXAL last week.

WAXAL is a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset designed to catalyse research and build more inclusive AI technologies. While voice-enabled technologies have become common in much of the world, a profound scarcity of high-quality speech data has prevented their development for most of Africa’s 2,000+ languages. This has excluded hundreds of millions of people from accessing technology in their native tongues.

Google said the WAXAL dataset was created to directly address this gap. Developed over three years with funding from Google, the project features 1,250 hours of transcribed, natural speech and over 20 hours of high-quality, studio recordings designed for building high-fidelity synthetic voices. “The ultimate impact of WAXAL is the empowerment of people in Africa”.

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Said Aisha Walcott-Bryantt, Head of Google Research Africa. “This dataset provides the critical foundation for students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to build technology on their own terms, in their own languages, finally reaching over 100 million people. We look forward to seeing African innovators use this data to create everything from new educational tools to voice-enabled services that create tangible economic opportunities across the continent.” A central principle of the project was to ensure it was built by and for the community. African academic and community organizations, including Makerere University (Uganda), the University of Ghana, and Digital Umuganda (Rwanda), led the data collection with guidance from Google experts.

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