Swahili Conversational Speech Dataset
2,000 hours of spontaneous two-person conversations in Swahili, recorded in Kenya with 200 vetted native speakers. Dual-channel audio, time-aligned human-verified transcripts and speaker metadata, licensed for commercial ASR, TTS and voice AI training.
This repository is the dataset card only. The audio is licensed commercially and isn't hosted on Hugging Face. Free samples (audio, matching transcripts and the metadata schema) are sent on request: request Swahili samples.
Specifications
| Language | Swahili |
| Recorded in | Kenya |
| Speech type | Spontaneous two-person conversations |
| Volume | 2,000 hours |
| Speakers | 200 vetted native speakers |
| Audio | Dual-channel, one channel per speaker |
| Transcripts | Time-aligned, human-verified |
| Speaker metadata | Age, gender, region, recording device |
| Consent | Signed commercial-use consent from every speaker |
| License | Commercial, for training and evaluation |
| Price | $65 per hour of audio, volume discounts available |
What makes Swahili hard for speech recognition
Swahili builds words from prefixes and suffixes around a root, and noun classes change agreement across the whole sentence. In Kenya, urban speakers mix it with English and Sheng slang, so models trained on formal or Tanzanian Swahili lose accuracy.
Built for
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR / STT)
- Text-to-speech and voice synthesis prosody
- Voice agents and IVR for Kenya
- Speaker diarization and turn-taking models
- Speech LLM and audio-understanding fine-tuning
Getting the data
Request samples with a company email on the Swahili dataset page and the team replies with representative audio and transcripts so you can check quality, accents and transcript conventions before you buy. Need more hours, another dialect or your own recording setup? SpeechData.ai also collects speech data to spec, or you can book a call.
About SpeechData.ai
SpeechData.ai licenses conversational speech datasets in 60 languages and dialects and runs custom speech data collection. It's part of Spirelight. Browse the full catalog.
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