freococo/rfa_shan_language_voices

RFA Shan Language Voices

This dataset contains 20.58 hours of audio in the Shan (Tai-Yai) language, sourced from news broadcasts by Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese. This is one of the largest publicly accessible audio resources for the Shan language, designed to support research in low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice activity detection, and other speech-related tasks.

The audio has been automatically segmented into 5,047 manageable chunks and prepared in the efficient WebDataset format. It includes rich metadata extracted from the original YouTube videos, but does not contain transcriptions, making it ideal for self-supervised pre-training or tasks that do not require text.

Acknowledgments

This dataset was made possible by the journalists and broadcasters at Radio Free Asia (RFA) who produce and publish high-quality content in the languages of Myanmar.

Dataset Structure & Format

This dataset follows the WebDataset format. Each sample consists of two paired files inside a .tar.gz archive:

• XXXX.mp3 — the audio chunk (up to 15 seconds)
• XXXX.json — the corresponding metadata (UTF-8 JSON)

Each .json file contains a rich set of fields preserved from the original YouTube video:

{
  "__key__": "_3fZIzO939U_chunk_0000",
  "file_name": "_3fZIzO939U_chunk_0000.mp3",
  "title": "ရှမ်းတိုင်းရင်းသားဘာသာ အစီအစဉ်",
  "uploader": "RFA လွတ်လပ်တဲ့အာရှအသံ",
  "channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE75dgnEYPacknHHg3a3sJg",
  "upload_date": "20221014",
  "duration": 15.0,
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3fZIzO939U",
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/_3fZIzO939U/maxresdefault.webp",
  "description": "ရှမ်းတိုင်းရင်းသားဘာသာ အစီအစဉ်\n~~~\n■ နိုင်ငံရေး စစ်ရေးပြဿနာတွေနဲ့ ပတ်သက်ပြီး RCSS/SSA  ကြေညာချက် ထုတ်ပြန်\n\n■ ကျိုက်ထီးရိုးဘုရား ကင်မွန်းစခန်းက စစ်ကောင်စီတပ်မ ၄၄ တပ်စခန်း ပစ်ခတ်ခံရ\n\n■  မိုင်းတင်အုပ်စုက စစ်ဘေးရှောင်တွေ နေရပ်ပြန်ကြဖို့ ခက်ခဲနေ\n____________\nSubscribe ▶ http://bit.ly/2ajgBxf\n\nမိုဘိုင်းအက်ပ် ▶ https://smarturl.it/RFAburmeseapp\nဝဘ်ဆိုက် ▶ https://www.rfa.org\nဖေ့စ်ဘွတ်ခ် ▶ https://www.facebook.com/rfaburmese\nတွစ်တာ ▶ https://twitter.com/RFABurmese\n\n(လွတ်လပ်တဲ့အာရှအသံရဲ့ တာဝန်နဲ့ရည်ရွယ်ချက်ဟာ သက်ဆိုင်ရာအစိုးရတွေရဲ့ ပိတ်ပင်ဟန့်တားမှုတွေကြောင့် သတင်းလွတ်လပ်ခွင့်မရှိတဲ့ အာရှနိုင်ငံတွေအတွက် တိကျမှန်ကန်တဲ့ သတင်းအချက်အလက်တွေ ထုတ်လွှင့်ပေးဖို့ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။)",
  "tags": [
    "Radio Free Asia",
    "Burma",
    "Myanmar",
    "Burmese",
    "RFA",
    "news"
  ],
  "view_count": 1085,
  "like_count": 14,
  "language": "shn",
  "original_video_id": "_3fZIzO939U"
}

Usage Example

You can easily stream this dataset using the Hugging Face datasets library. The streaming=True mode is highly recommended.

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "freococo/rfa_shan_language_voices",
    split="train",
    streaming=True
)

for sample in dataset.take(5):
    print(sample["audio"])          # Audio object with decoded waveform
    print(sample["json"]["title"])  # Access metadata from the JSON
    print(f"Duration: {sample['json']['duration']}s")

Known Limitations

This dataset was created using an automated pipeline and has the following characteristics:

• No Transcriptions: This dataset is audio-only and does not include text transcriptions.
• Background Noise: As the audio is sourced from news broadcasts, some segments may contain background music, jingles, or other non-speech sounds.
• No Speaker Labels: The dataset does not differentiate between different speakers within or across broadcasts.

Despite these limitations, this resource is invaluable for pre-training models like Wav2Vec2, developing voice activity detection systems, or performing other unsupervised speech research for the Shan language.

Licensing & Use

This dataset contains audio content derived from the official YouTube channel of Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese. All original content is the exclusive property of RFA and is protected by copyright.

The use of this dataset is governed by the official RFA Terms of Use.

In summary, the content is made available for non-commercial, informational, and educational purposes only.

• Permitted Use: You may use this dataset for non-commercial research, personal projects, and educational applications.
• Prohibited Use: Any commercial use, including but not limited to training proprietary AI models for commercial products, is not permitted without explicit written permission from RFA.
• Required Attribution: When using or referencing this dataset, you must provide clear attribution to Radio Free Asia (RFA) as the original source of the content.

By using this dataset, you agree to abide by these terms.

📚 Citation

If you use this dataset in your work, please cite it as follows:

> **Freococo (2025).**  
> *RFA Shan Language Voices*  
> [https://huggingface.co/datasets/freococo/rfa_shan_language_voices](https://huggingface.co/datasets/freococo/rfa_shan_language_voices)  
> Dataset compiled from Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese news broadcasts.