BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus
This provides a valuable resource for researchers and developers working on speech technology for underrepresented African languages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Bible recordings.
The authors tackled the lack of high-quality speech data for African languages by creating BibleTTS, a large, multilingual corpus with up to 86 hours per language, enabling the development of text-to-speech models as demonstrated with Coqui TTS.
BibleTTS is a large, high-quality, open speech dataset for ten languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa. The corpus contains up to 86 hours of aligned, studio quality 48kHz single speaker recordings per language, enabling the development of high-quality text-to-speech models. The ten languages represented are: Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi, Chichewa, Ewe, Hausa, Kikuyu, Lingala, Luganda, Luo, and Yoruba. This corpus is a derivative work of Bible recordings made and released by the Open.Bible project from Biblica. We have aligned, cleaned, and filtered the original recordings, and additionally hand-checked a subset of the alignments for each language. We present results for text-to-speech models with Coqui TTS. The data is released under a commercial-friendly CC-BY-SA license.