Datasets:

Bateesa
/

kiswahili-tts-dataset

language:
  - sw
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
  - text-to-speech
  - automatic-speech-recognition
pretty_name: Kiswahili Tts Dataset
tags:
  - kiswahili
  - swahili
  - sw
  - tts
  - speech
  - east-africa
  - kenya
  - tanzania
dataset_info:
  features:
    - name: audio
      dtype: audio
    - name: text
      dtype: string
    - name: frequency
      dtype: int32
    - name: source
      dtype: string
  splits:
    - name: train
      num_examples: 11245
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K

Kiswahili Tts Dataset

Dataset Description

Kiswahili (Swahili) TTS dataset combining two sub-collections: (1) the 'A Kiswahili Dataset for Development of Text-To-Speech System' corpus (Kiswa-XXXXX studio recordings with Biblical and general-domain text), and (2) crowdsourced Swahili speech (swh_XXX recordings at 16kHz, studio quality). Covers topics relevant to East Africa.

Languages

Language: Kiswahili / Swahili (sw)
BCP-47: sw

Source tag

kiswahili — value of the source column in every row.

Dataset Structure

Column	Type	Description
`audio`	Audio	Raw WAV audio at original recording frequency
`text`	string	Transcription of the spoken content
`frequency`	int	Sample rate in Hz of the audio
`source`	string	Origin label (`kiswahili`)

Splits

Split	Samples
train	11245

Related Work

Prepared in the context of East African speech technology research. See also the Sunbird AI SALT dataset — a multi-language parallel corpus covering Luganda, Acholi, Swahili, Runyankole, Lugbara, and Ateso, used as a benchmark for TTS/ASR in East Africa.

License

CC BY 4.0

Citation

@dataset{kiswahili_tts,
  author    = {Bateesa},
  title     = {Kiswahili Tts Dataset},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {HuggingFace},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Bateesa/kiswahili-tts-dataset}
}