---
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](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Sunbird/salt) —
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](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

## Citation

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