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- # Simba-S
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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+ <div align="center">
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+
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+ <img src="https://africa.dlnlp.ai/simba/images/VoC_simba" alt="VoC Simba Models Logo">
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+
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+
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+ [![EMNLP 2025 Paper](https://img.shields.io/badge/EMNLP_2025-Paper-B31B1B?style=for-the-badge&logo=arxiv&logoColor=B31B1B&labelColor=FFCDD2)](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.559/)
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+ [![Official Website](https://img.shields.io/badge/Official-Website-2EA44F?style=for-the-badge&logo=googlechrome&logoColor=2EA44F&labelColor=C8E6C9)](https://africa.dlnlp.ai/simba/)
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+ [![SimbaBench](https://img.shields.io/badge/SimbaBench-Benchmark-8A2BE2?style=for-the-badge&logo=googlecharts&logoColor=8A2BE2&labelColor=E1BEE7)](#simbabench)
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+ [![Hugging Face](https://img.shields.io/badge/%F0%9F%A4%97%20Hugging%20Face-Models-FFD21E?style=for-the-badge&logoColor=black&labelColor=FFF9C4)](https://huggingface.co/collections/UBC-NLP/simba-speech-series)
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+ [![YouTube Video](https://img.shields.io/badge/YouTube-Video-FF0000?style=for-the-badge&logo=youtube&logoColor=FF0000&labelColor=FFCCBC)](#demo)
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+
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+ </div>
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+
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+ ## *Bridging the Digital Divide for African AI*
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+
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+ **Voice of a Continent** is a comprehensive open-source ecosystem designed to bring African languages to the forefront of artificial intelligence. By providing a unified suite of benchmarking tools and state-of-the-art models, we ensure that the future of speech technology is inclusive, representative, and accessible to over a billion people.
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+
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+ ## Best-in-Class Multilingual Models
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+
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+ Introduced in our EMNLP 2025 paper *[Voice of a Continent](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.559/)*, the **Simba Series** represents the current state-of-the-art for African speech AI.
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+
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+ - **Unified Suite:** Models optimized for African languages.
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+ - **Superior Accuracy:** Outperforms generic multilingual models by leveraging SimbaBench's high-quality, domain-diverse datasets.
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+ - **Multitask Capability:** Designed for high performance in ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) and TTS (Text-to-Speech).
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+ - **Inclusion-First:** Specifically built to mitigate the "digital divide" by empowering speakers of underrepresented languages.
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+
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+ The **Simba** family consists of state-of-the-art models fine-tuned using SimbaBench. These models achieve superior performance by leveraging dataset quality, domain diversity, and language family relationships.
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+
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+ ### πŸ—£οΈβœοΈ Simba-ASR
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+ > **The New Standard for African Speech-to-Text**
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+
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+ **🎯 Task** `Automatic Speech Recognition` β€” Powering high-accuracy transcription across the continent.
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+
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+ **🌍 Language Coverage (43 African languages)**
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+ > **Amharic** (`amh`), **Arabic** (`ara`), **Asante Twi** (`asanti`), **Bambara** (`bam`), **BaoulΓ©** (`bau`), **Bemba** (`bem`), **Ewe** (`ewe`), **Fanti** (`fat`), **Fon** (`fon`), **French** (`fra`), **Ganda** (`lug`), **Hausa** (`hau`), **Igbo** (`ibo`), **Kabiye** (`kab`), **Kinyarwanda** (`kin`), **Kongo** (`kon`), **Lingala** (`lin`), **Luba-Katanga** (`lub`), **Luo** (`luo`), **Malagasy** (`mlg`), **Mossi** (`mos`), **Northern Sotho** (`nso`), **Nyanja** (`nya`), **Oromo** (`orm`), **Portuguese** (`por`), **Shona** (`sna`), **Somali** (`som`), **Southern Sotho** (`sot`), **Swahili** (`swa`), **Swati** (`ssw`), **Tigrinya** (`tir`), **Tsonga** (`tso`), **Tswana** (`tsn`), **Twi** (`twi`), **Umbundu** (`umb`), **Venda** (`ven`), **Wolof** (`wol`), **Xhosa** (`xho`), **Yoruba** (`yor`), **Zulu** (`zul`), **Tamazight** (`tzm`), **Sango** (`sag`), **Dinka** (`din`).
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+
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+ **πŸ—οΈ Base Architectures**
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+
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+ - **Simba-S** (SeamlessM4T-v2-MT) β€” *Top Performer*
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+ - **Simba-W** (Whisper-v3-large)
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+ - **Simba-X** (Wav2Vec2-XLS-R-2b)
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+ - **Simba-M** (MMS-1b-all)
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+ - **Simba-H** (AfriHuBERT)
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+
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+ | **ASR Models** | **Architecture** | **πŸ€— Hugging Face Model Card** | **Status** |
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+ |---------|:------------------:| :------------------:| :------------------:|
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+ | πŸ”₯**Simba-S**πŸ”₯| SeamlessM4T-v2 | πŸ€— [https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-S](https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-S) | βœ… Released |
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+ | πŸ”₯**Simba-W**πŸ”₯| Whisper | πŸ€— [https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-W](https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-W) | βœ… Released |
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+ | πŸ”₯**Simba-X**πŸ”₯| Wav2Vec2 | πŸ€— [https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-X](https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-X) | βœ… Released |
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+ | πŸ”₯**Simba-M**πŸ”₯| MMS | πŸ€— [https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-M](https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-M) | βœ… Released |
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+ | πŸ”₯**Simba-H**πŸ”₯| HuBERT | πŸ€— [https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-H](https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-H) | βœ… Released |
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+
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+ * **Simba-S** (based on SeamlessM4T-v2-MT) emerged as the best-performing ASR model overall.
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+
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+ **🧩 Usage Example**
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+
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+ You can easily run inference using the Hugging Face `transformers` library.
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+
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+ ```python
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+ from transformers import pipeline
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+
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+ # Load Simba-S for ASR
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+ asr_pipeline = pipeline(
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+ "automatic-speech-recognition",
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+ model="UBC-NLP/Simba-S" #Simba mdoels `UBC-NLP/Simba-S`, `UBC-NLP/Simba-W`, `UBC-NLP/Simba-X`, `UBC-NLP/Simba-H`, `UBC-NLP/Simba-M`
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+ )
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+
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+ asr_pipeline.model.load_adapter("multilingual_african") # Only for `UBC-NLP/Simba-M`
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+
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+ # Transcribe audio from file
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+ result = asr_pipeline("https://africa.dlnlp.ai/simba/audio/afr_Lwazi_afr_test_idx3889.wav")
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+ print(result["text"])
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+
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+
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+ # Transcribe audio from audio array
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+ result = asr_pipeline({
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+ "array": audio_array,
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+ "sampling_rate": 16_000
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+ })
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+ print(result["text"])
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+
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+ ```
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+ Get started with Simba models in minutes using our interactive Colab notebook: [![Open In Colab](https://colab.research.google.com/assets/colab-badge.svg)](https://github.com/UBC-NLP/simba/edit/main/simba_models.ipynb)
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+
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+
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+ ## Citation
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+
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+ If you use the Simba models or SimbaBench benchmark for your scientific publication, or if you find the resources in this website useful, please cite our paper.
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+
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+ ```bibtex
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+
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+ @inproceedings{elmadany-etal-2025-voice,
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+ title = "Voice of a Continent: Mapping {A}frica{'}s Speech Technology Frontier",
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+ author = "Elmadany, AbdelRahim A. and
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+ Kwon, Sang Yun and
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+ Toyin, Hawau Olamide and
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+ Alcoba Inciarte, Alcides and
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+ Aldarmaki, Hanan and
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+ Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad",
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+ editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
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+ Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
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+ Rose, Carolyn and
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+ Peng, Violet",
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+ booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
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+ month = nov,
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+ year = "2025",
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+ address = "Suzhou, China",
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+ publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
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+ url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.559/",
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+ doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.559",
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+ pages = "11039--11061",
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+ ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
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+ }
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+
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+ ```
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+