C4IR-RW/kinya-ag-tts

Kinyarwanda Agricultural Text-to-Speech Dataset

In Rwanda, many farmers struggle to access timely, personalized agricultural information. Traditional channels - like radio, TV, and online sources - offer limited reach and interactivity, while extension services and a national call center, staffed by only two agents for over two million farmers, face capacity constraints. To address these gaps, we developed a 24/7 AI-enabled Interactive Voice Response (IVR) tool. Accessible via a Kinyarwanda-speaking hotline, this tool provides advisory on topics such as pest and disease diagnosis and agro-climatic practices, as well as information on MINAGRI’s support programs for farmers, e.g. crop insurances. By utilizing AI and IVR technology, this project will make agricultural advisories more accessible, timely, and responsive to farmers’ needs. For more information, please reach out to C4IR.

Implemented by: C4IR Rwanda & KiNLP; Supported by GIZ; Financed by: BMZ.

Technical documentation

The dataset contains male and female voice recordings and their original text from an agricultural knowledge base.

The text is provided as tab-separated values (TSV) files without a header. The first column is the the audio clip ID and the second column is the actual text that was read by the voice actor.

Similar audio clip ids for both female and male actors correspond to the same text.

Dataset details:

• Audio sampling rate: 24 KHz
• Audio format: WAV
• Channels: Mono
• Voice actors: 2 (female and male)
• Number of clips: 5242 (female), 5238 (male)

License

This model is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0).

Attribution: Please attribute this work to C4IR Rwanda and KiNLP.