Swivuriso: The South African Next Voices Multilingual Speech Dataset

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02201v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:49:10 GMT
• Title: Swivuriso: The South African Next Voices Multilingual Speech Dataset
• Authors: Vukosi Marivatee, Kayode Olaleye, Sitwala Mundia, Andinda Bakainga, Unarine Netshifhefhe, Mahmooda Milanzie, Tsholofelo Hope Mogale, Thapelo Sindane, Zainab Abdulrasaq, Kesego Mokgosi, Chijioke Okorie, Nia Zion Van Wyk, Graham Morrissey, Dale Dunbar, Francois Smit, Tsosheletso Chidi, Rooweither Mabuya, Andiswa Bukula, Respect Mlambo, Tebogo Macucwa, Idris Abdulmumin, and Seani Rananga,
• Abstract summary: Swivuriso is a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project.<n>We describe the design principles, ethical considerations, and data collection procedures that guided the dataset creation.
• Score: 2.2823062679418746
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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