Related papers: Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontier

Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontier

URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18436v3
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2025 23:16:29 GMT
Title: Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontier
Authors: AbdelRahim Elmadany, Sang Yun Kwon, Hawau Olamide Toyin, Alcides Alcoba Inciarte, Hanan Aldarmaki, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed,
Abstract summary: Africa's rich linguistic diversity remains significantly underrepresented in speech technologies.<n>We introduce the Simba family of models, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple African languages and speech tasks.<n>Our work highlights the need for expanded speech technology resources that better reflect Africa's linguistic diversity.
Score: 14.063189144905074
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
Abstract: Africa's rich linguistic diversity remains significantly underrepresented in speech technologies, creating barriers to digital inclusion. To alleviate this challenge, we systematically map the continent's speech space of datasets and technologies, leading to a new comprehensive benchmark SimbaBench for downstream African speech tasks. Using SimbaBench, we introduce the Simba family of models, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple African languages and speech tasks. Our benchmark analysis reveals critical patterns in resource availability, while our model evaluation demonstrates how dataset quality, domain diversity, and language family relationships influence performance across languages. Our work highlights the need for expanded speech technology resources that better reflect Africa's linguistic diversity and provides a solid foundation for future research and development efforts toward more inclusive speech technologies.

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