Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontier
This work addresses digital inclusion barriers for Africa's diverse linguistic communities by providing foundational resources and models, though it is incremental in building on existing speech technology frameworks.
The authors tackled the underrepresentation of Africa's linguistic diversity in speech technologies by creating SimbaBench, a comprehensive benchmark for African speech tasks, and the Simba family of models, which achieved state-of-the-art performance across multiple African languages and speech tasks.
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.