Loading datasets...
Release Date: 11/4/2026
Format: FLAC, JSON, JSONL, MD, TSV
Size: 58.53 MB
The Pashto Hekmat Aryan Poetry Recitation Corpus, prepared by the Digital Pashto Association and PashtoAI, is a single-speaker Pashto speech dataset containing 270 speech segments totaling 0.627 hours. The recordings are recitations by Hekmat Aryan of poems he wrote himself. Hekmat Aryan is a 35-year-old male Pashto speaker from Ghazni in central Afghanistan, a journalist and writer with experience in radio and informative narration. The recitations were originally published on his YouTube channel. Each audio segment is paired with its Pashto transcript. Poetry recitation offers expressive, rhythmic and carefully articulated speech, which makes the corpus useful for expressive text-to-speech, prosody modeling and pronunciation research, as well as automatic speech recognition. Hekmat Aryan is both the author of the poems and the speaker, and he has given written consent for his poems and recordings to be used and openly released in this dataset. The dataset is released under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, allowing anyone to use, copy, modify, redistribute and build on it for research, educational, commercial and other purposes, to the extent permitted by law. Because the corpus contains a single male speaker and a single genre, it is not representative of all Pashto dialects, speakers or speaking styles.
Released under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. The dataset owner confirms that Hekmat Aryan, who is both the author of the poems and the speaker in the recordings, has given written consent for the poems and recordings to be used and openly released in this dataset, including public redistribution, AI/ML training, research and commercial use. No additional dataset-specific restrictions are imposed.
No additional dataset-specific prohibitions are imposed beyond applicable law.
Ethical Review
The speaker, Hekmat Aryan, is also the author of the poems. He gave written consent for his poems and recordings to be used and openly released in this dataset, including AI/ML use. No independent ethics-board certification is asserted. Technical checks do not replace a full manual listening review.
Intended Use
Pashto text-to-speech and expressive speech synthesis, prosody and pronunciation research, automatic speech recognition, and speech-text alignment.
Composition: 270 clips totaling 0.627314 hours. Single speaker: Hekmat Aryan (male, 35, Ghazni, central Afghanistan), reciting poems he wrote himself. Source: his YouTube poetry recitation playlist. Domain: poetry recitation.
Processing: Long recordings were fully decoded before segmentation. Audio was cut at source transcript timestamps rounded to sample boundaries and stored as 16-bit PCM FLAC. Original sample rates and channel configurations were preserved, with no resampling, denoising or gain adjustment. Every FLAC file was decoded and compared sample-for-sample. Manifests (TSV and JSONL) retain original text, normalized text, source filenames, timestamps and hashes. Transcript normalization is limited to whitespace.
Selection: 358 source transcript entries = 86 inventory exclusions + 2 packaging exclusions + 270 retained clips. Originals and exclusion logs are preserved for provenance.
Limitations: Technical decoding confirms readability, not the accuracy of every transcript or segment boundary. Some recitations may include background music. No speaker-disjoint train/test split is provided. The corpus is small and single-speaker, so it is best used for fine-tuning, evaluation or as part of a larger collection.
