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

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.

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.

To address this critical need, we introduce WAXAL: a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset that initially covers 27 Sub-Saharan African languages spoken by over 100 million speakers across more than 26 countries. Developed through a multi-year effort beginning in 2021, in collaboration with African academic and community organizations, WAXAL provides the high-quality, permissively licensed data necessary to build robust speech systems. Setting a foundational milestone, this initial release features approximately 1,846 hours of transcribed natural speech for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and over 565 hours of high-fidelity recordings for text-to-speech (TTS). We are releasing these resources under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-4.0) to catalyze research and enable inclusive voice-enabled technologies tailored to the unique linguistic characteristics of the continent. We intend for the WAXAL collection to continuously evolve and expand to include additional languages as part of our ongoing effort to bridge the digital divide.