---
language:
- sw
tags:
- whisper
- automatic-speech-recognition
- swahili
- nonstandard-speech
- kenya
- low-resource
datasets:
- ElizabethMwangi/swahili_afrivoice_all_domains_v0.1
- cdli/common_voice_swahili_small
- cdli/kenyan_swahili_nonstandard_speech_v1.0
base_model: ElizabethMwangi/whisper-small-swahili-afrivoice-cv
license: apache-2.0
---

# Whisper Small — Swahili NSS (AfriVoice 5 Domains + Common Voice)

Stage 2 nonstandard speech fine-tune of [openai/whisper-small](https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-small) on the CDLI Kenyan Swahili Nonstandard Speech dataset. Built on top of [ElizabethMwangi/whisper-small-swahili-afrivoice-cv](https://huggingface.co/ElizabethMwangi/whisper-small-swahili-afrivoice-cv), a Stage 1 standard speech checkpoint.

## Training Details

- **Stage 1 base:** [ElizabethMwangi/whisper-small-swahili-afrivoice-cv](https://huggingface.co/ElizabethMwangi/whisper-small-swahili-afrivoice-cv)
- **Stage 1 data:** AfriVoice Swahili all 5 domains (389,599 utterances) + Common Voice Swahili (4,548 utterances)
- **Stage 2 dataset:** cdli/kenyan_swahili_nonstandard_speech_v1.0 (849 examples)
- **Language token:** sw
- **Full model training:** encoder, decoder, and projection updated
- **SpecAugment:** On
- **Learning rate:** 5e-5 (polynomial decay, warmup 40 steps)
- **Max steps:** 1000
- **Output dir:** sw_nss_tune_whisper_v3_small_afrivoice_v1.2

## Results on Kenyan Swahili Nonstandard Speech

**Overall**

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| Overall WER | 0.449 |
| Overall CER | 0.221 |
| Avg WER | 0.365 |
| Avg CER | 0.163 |
| Meaning preservation | 59.4% |

**By severity**

| Severity | WER | CER |
|----------|-----|-----|
| Mild | 0.29 | 0.12 |
| Moderate | 0.36 | 0.15 |
| Severe | 0.43 | 0.20 |

**By etiology**

| Etiology | WER | CER |
|----------|-----|-----|
| Cerebral Palsy | 0.44 | 0.21 |
| Multiple Sclerosis | 0.40 | 0.18 |
| Neurodevelopmental disorder | 0.26 | 0.11 |
| Parkinson's Disease | 0.28 | 0.07 |