BibleTTS Chichewa studio-quality speech

Source

The Chichewa subset of BibleTTS was published as unaligned chapter-level audio, a derivative of the Open.Bible recordings released by Biblica. This release is the CLEAR Global verse-level segmentation of those recordings: each chapter was split into per-verse clips and force-aligned against the Chichewa Bible text.

HuggingFace repository: https://huggingface.co/datasets/CLEAR-Global/BibleTTS-Chichewa

Data Structure

• clips/ — 45,728 WAV files, 24 kHz mono PCM, named __.wav.
• metadata.tsv — one row per clip with the columns path, split, text, duration, score.

score is the forced aligner's confidence for the clip (an average per-token log-probability; negative, higher is better, length-normalised). The train, dev and test splits are the cleaned set: only clips with score > -45 and no numerals in the transcript. The other split holds the clips excluded by those filters and is not intended for TTS training as-is. Every clip is published in exactly one split.

Citation

Meyer, J., Adelani, D., Casanova, E., Öktem, A., Whitenack, D., Weber, J., KABONGO KABENAMUALU, S., Salesky, E., Orife, I., Leong, C., Ogayo, P., Chinenye Emezue, C., Mukiibi, J., Osei, S., AGBOLO, A., Akinode, V., Opoku, B., Samuel, O., Alabi, J., Muhammad, S.H. (2022) BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus. Proc. Interspeech 2022, 2383-2387, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10850

@inproceedings{meyer22c_interspeech,
  title     = {{BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus}},
  author    = {Josh Meyer and David Adelani and Edresson Casanova and Alp Öktem and Daniel Whitenack and Julian Weber and Salomon {KABONGO KABENAMUALU} and Elizabeth Salesky and Iroro Orife and Colin Leong and Perez Ogayo and Chris {Chinenye Emezue} and Jonathan Mukiibi and Salomey Osei and Apelete AGBOLO and Victor Akinode and Bernard Opoku and Olanrewaju Samuel and Jesujoba Alabi and Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad},
  year      = {2022},
  booktitle = {{Interspeech 2022}},
  pages     = {2383--2387},
  doi       = {10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10850},
  issn      = {2958-1796},
}

DeRenzi, B., Dixon, A., Farhi, M.A., Resch, C. (2025) Synthetic Voice Data for Automatic Speech Recognition in African Languages. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing NLP for Low-Resource Languages, pages 152–186, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd.

@inproceedings{derenzi-etal-2025-synthetic,
  title     = "Synthetic Voice Data for Automatic Speech Recognition in {A}frican Languages",
  author    = "DeRenzi, Brian and Dixon, Anna and Farhi, Mohamed Aymane and Resch, Christian",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing {NLP} for Low-Resource Languages",
  month     = sep,
  year      = "2025",
  address   = "Varna, Bulgaria",
  publisher = "INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria",
  url       = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.lowresnlp-1.16/",
  pages     = "152--186"
}

Disclaimer

The recordings are derived from the Open.Bible project by Biblica via the BibleTTS corpus and are redistributed here as a derivative work. Verse-level segmentation and alignment were carried out by CLEAR Global, continuing the Masakhane BibleTTS collaboration. Single-speaker Bible-domain data: not representative of everyday spoken Chichewa. Provided as-is for research and development.

Please check README.md for more information.