Google Research· Research

WAXAL: A large-scale open resource for African language speech technology

Tavonga Siyavora, Senior Product Manager, and Abdoulaye Diack, Program Manager, Google Research WAXAL provides a critical, open-access foundation for African speech technology. Featuring a large corpus of ASR and TTS data for 27 native languages under a highly permissive license, WAXAL empowers the African AI ecosystem to build robust speech systems that better reflect the region's unique linguistic diversity. Quick links WAXAL dataset Paper Share Copy link × Voice-enabled technologies like virtual assistants and automated transcription have transformed how we interact with computers. However, their benefits disproportionately favor a handful of high-resource languages. This divide has left hundreds of millions of people — particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, home to over 2,000 distinct languages — unable to access essential technology in their native tongues. Several years ago, the team at Google Research set out to help tackle this problem. Watch the film Link to Youtube Video To address this critical need, we introduce WAXAL : a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset …

Announced

06 Mar 2026 20:06 UTC