Research Saturday Week 11: Building African Voices

​We begin 2026 with a focus on speech technology for African languages.

​This session will examine Building African Voices by Perez Ogayo, Graham Neubig and Alan W. Black. The paper introduces the AfricanVoices initiative, which explores how to build and openly release text to speech systems for African languages using curated and found data.

​The study demonstrates that intelligible speech synthesizers can be developed with limited recorded data, even outside studio environments. It also presents datasets, tools and trained voices for multiple African languages, contributing to more accessible speech technology research and deployment.

​During this session, we will:

​• Review the participatory and data collection methodology
• Examine how quality and scalability were balanced
• Discuss implications for low resource African speech systems
• Identify gaps and research directions for the community

• ​Presenter: Mr. Adeniyi Emmanuel

• ​Affiliation: Researcher; Bowen University, Datum Africa.

• ​Date: Saturday, 28 February 2026

• ​Time: 5 PM WAT

​Join us as we explore practical approaches to building sustainable and inclusive African speech technologies.