Yoruba Conversational Speech Dataset
2,000 hours of spontaneous two-person conversations in Yoruba, recorded in Nigeria 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 Yoruba samples.
Specifications
| Language | Yoruba |
| Recorded in | Nigeria |
| 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 Yoruba hard for speech recognition
Yoruba has three tones that change meaning. Careful writing marks them with accents, but most text online leaves them out, so web text is ambiguous. Nigerian speakers also mix in English constantly, and very little transcribed conversational Yoruba is publicly available.
Built for
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR / STT)
- Text-to-speech and voice synthesis prosody
- Voice agents and IVR for Nigeria
- Speaker diarization and turn-taking models
- Speech LLM and audio-understanding fine-tuning
Getting the data
Request samples with a company email on the Yoruba 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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