How to Use this Playbook

This playbook is for anyone who wants to collect voice data in an African language, whether the project is:

• Small — 50–100 speakers

• Medium — 500–1,000 speakers

• Large — thousands of contributors

• Academic

• Community-led

• Government-led

• NGO-led

• Commercial

• Open-source

• Designed for ASR/TTS

• Intended for language documentation

• Intended for AI research

It is designed to answer a simple question:

“If I want to collect voice data in my language, what exactly do I need to do?”

The playbook takes you through the entire lifecycle:

Plan → Design → Prepare → Mobilize → Recruit → Consent → Train → Record → Validate → Transcribe → QA → Pay → Document → Release → Sustain

Voice collection is not simply a recording exercise. It is an operational system involving people, language expertise, community relationships, technology, quality control, ethics and data management. The AfriVoices-KE project organized these functions through language leads, resource persons, mobilizers, contributors, validators, transcribers, super-reviewers and administrators.