BibleTTS Lingala - Aligned Bible Speech

Source

BibleTTS is a Masakhane project: the BibleTTS project page documents the corpus and hosts the TTS models and audio samples. The recordings and text come from the Open.Bible project: chapter-level studio recordings plus the Open Contemporary Bible translation, both released by Biblica. BibleTTS cut the chapter-long recordings into short clips at verse level, so every clip is a brief utterance with an exact transcript — usable directly for ASR and TTS training, not as continuous audiobook material.

Lingala was segmented in BibleTTS using the verse-level timestamp files released with the Open.Bible recordings, rather than force-aligned from scratch, followed by transcript/audio length-ratio outlier filtering. Native-speaker annotators judged 74% of a 50-clip sample to be exact matches between audio and transcript.

Data Structure

• clips// — 11,358 FLAC files, 48 kHz, 24-bit, mono, named __Verse_.flac.
• metadata.tsv — one row per clip with the columns path, split, book, text, duration.

dev is the book of Ezra and test is Colossians; both are held out at book level, so no clip of those books appears in train.

The audio is unchanged: same FLAC files, same 48 kHz 24-bit mono format, not resampled or re-aligned. Only the directory layout (book folders folded into the filenames) and the added metadata.tsv differ from the source corpus.

Coverage

The corpus is not a continuous reading of the Bible. It holds the clips that came out cleanly and survived alignment-quality filtering: 11,358 clips from 635 chapters across 37 books — both testaments, poetry and prose.

Narrators

The source corpus carries no speaker labels, so none are added in this release.

Relation to the paper's figures

The Interspeech 2022 paper reports 15,117 aligned Lingala samples (71.6 h) for this corpus. The released corpus contains 11,358 clips (55.3 h); the smaller count reflects alignment-quality filtering applied after the paper rather than a different segmentation. The corpus as distributed is the authoritative version and is what this release reproduces.

Other BibleTTS datasets

You can also find the rest of the BibleTTS datasets on Mozilla Data Collective.

Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi, Ewe, Lingala and Yoruba are part of the original Masakhane BibleTTS release; Hausa, Chichewa and Dholuo (Luo) were force-aligned and released by CLEAR Global afterwards.

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},
}

Disclaimer

The recordings and text are derived from the Open.Bible project by Biblica and are redistributed here as a derivative work of the Masakhane BibleTTS corpus, with the agreement of the corpus authors. CLEAR Global is a partner in the BibleTTS initiative; it did not create, align or modify this audio, only repackaged it. Bible-domain speech: not representative of everyday spoken Lingala. Provided as-is for research and development.

Please check README.md for more information.