WAXAL: A Large-Scale Multilingual African Language Speech Corpus
Authors:
Abdoulaye Diack,
Perry Nelson,
Kwaku Agbesi,
Angela Nakalembe,
MohamedElfatih MohamedKhair,
Vusumuzi Dube,
Tavonga Siyavora,
Subhashini Venugopalan,
Jason Hickey,
Uche Okonkwo,
Abhishek Bapna,
Isaac Wiafe,
Raynard Dodzi Helegah,
Elikem Doe Atsakpo,
Charles Nutrokpor,
Fiifi Baffoe Payin Winful,
Kafui Kwashie Solaga,
Jamal-Deen Abdulai,
Akon Obu Ekpezu,
Audace Niyonkuru,
Samuel Rutunda,
Boris Ishimwe,
Michael Melese,
Engineer Bainomugisha,
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
, et al. (18 additional authors not shown)
Abstract:
The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset for 24 languages representing over 100 million speakers. The collection consists of two main components: an Automated Speech Recognit…
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The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset for 24 languages representing over 100 million speakers. The collection consists of two main components: an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset containing approximately 1,250 hours of transcribed, natural speech from a diverse range of speakers, and a Text-to-Speech (TTS) dataset with around 235 hours of high-quality, single-speaker recordings reading phonetically balanced scripts. This paper details our methodology for data collection, annotation, and quality control, which involved partnerships with four African academic and community organizations. We provide a detailed statistical overview of the dataset and discuss its potential limitations and ethical considerations. The WAXAL datasets are released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/WaxalNLP under the permissive CC-BY-4.0 license to catalyze research, enable the development of inclusive technologies, and serve as a vital resource for the digital preservation of these languages.
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Submitted 2 March, 2026; v1 submitted 2 February, 2026;
originally announced February 2026.