Overview

1.1 Purpose of the Voice Playbook

This playbook provides practical, ethical, and scalable guidance for collecting voice datasets for African languages, particularly low-resource languages with limited digital presence.

The playbook enables:

• Community-led voice dataset creation

• Standardized speech dataset methodologies

• Ethical and consent-based recording

• Scalable workflows for NLP training

• Reusable processes for future language initiatives

The playbook supports Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and multimodal language models.

African languages remain severely underrepresented in speech datasets, limiting their participation in modern AI systems. Many African languages lack large-scale audio datasets necessary for training speech technologies.

This playbook lowers barriers by enabling grassroots communities, universities, NGOs, and language activists to collect high-quality speech data.