🗣️ SALAMA-STT — Swahili Whisper ASR Model
**Developer:** AI4NNOV
**Version:** v1.0
**License:** Apache 2.0
**Model Type:** Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
**Base Model:** `openai/whisper-small` (fine-tuned for Swahili)
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## 🌍 Overview
**SALAMA-STT** (Speech-to-Text) is the **first module** of the **SALAMA Framework**—a modular end-to-end **speech-to-speech AI system** built for African languages.
This model is fine-tuned from OpenAI’s **Whisper-small** architecture for **Swahili speech recognition**, enhancing performance on African accents and conversational data.
The model converts Swahili audio input into accurate transcriptions and serves as the entry point for downstream LLM and TTS modules.
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## 🧱 Model Architecture
SALAMA-STT leverages the **Whisper-small** architecture with a **transformer encoder-decoder** optimized for low-resource Swahili audio transcription tasks.
The model was fine-tuned on the **Mozilla Common Voice 17.0 Swahili** dataset, ens…
