Datasets:

CLEAR-Global
/

Kenyan-Swahili-Speech

A single-speaker read speech dataset in Kenyan Swahili, containing approximately 6 hours of prompted recordings from an anonymous male speaker. The dataset was produced as part of CLEAR Global's Gamayun Language Data Kits initiative, which develops open-source language resources for under-resourced languages used in humanitarian contexts.

The sentence set is shared with CLEAR Global's Gamayun Swahili–English parallel text kit. English source sentences were selected from Tatoeba using a frequency-based algorithm documented in the corepus-gen repository; Swahili translations were produced by the CLEAR Global translator community.

Loading the dataset

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("CLEAR-Global/Kenyan-Swahili-Speech")

File structure

├── clips/
│   ├── 1/          # recording session subdirectory
│   │   └── *.wav
│   ├── 7/
│   └── ...
├── metadata.csv    # file_name, transcription, duration
└── LICENSE

The metadata.csv file contains:

Column	Description
`file_name`	Relative path to the WAV file (e.g. `clips/1/xxx.wav`)
`transcription`	Swahili sentence
`duration`	Duration in seconds

Restrictions and forbidden uses

This dataset is released under CC-BY-NC-4.0. In addition to the license terms, the following uses are explicitly forbidden:

Attempting to determine the identity of the speaker
Voice cloning or TTS synthesis that matches the characteristics of the speaker
Re-hosting or re-sharing this dataset without CLEAR Global's explicit permission
Commercial use of any kind
Usage without attribution to CLEAR Global

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite Gamayun – Language Technology for Humanitarian Response:

@inproceedings{oktem2020gamayun,
  title     = {Gamayun -- Language Technology for Humanitarian Response},
  author    = {Öktem, Alp and Albayk Jaam, Muhannad and DeLuca, Eric and Tang, Grace},
  booktitle = {2020 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)},
  year      = {2020},
  address   = {Virtual},
  month     = {October 29 -- November 1}
}

Acknowledgements

This dataset was produced by CLEAR Global (formerly Translators without Borders). The Gamayun initiative is part of CLEAR Global's effort to develop open-source language technology for under-resourced languages used in humanitarian contexts.