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.