freococo/karenni_language_asr_audio

RFA Karenni (Kayah) Language Voices

This dataset contains 17 hours of audio in the Karenni (Kayah) language, sourced from news broadcasts by Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese. This is one of the largest publicly accessible audio resources for the Karenni language family, designed to support research in low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice activity detection, and other speech-related tasks.

This dataset was created by freococo.

The audio has been automatically segmented into 4,170 manageable chunks and prepared in the efficient WebDataset format. It includes rich metadata extracted from the original YouTube videos, but does not contain transcriptions, making it ideal for self-supervised pre-training or tasks that do not require text.

Note on Language Codes: The source material is labeled as "Karenni." The specific dialect (e.g., Eastern or Western Kayah) is not specified. For clarity and precision, the ISO 639-3 code kyu (Western Kayah) has been used as a primary identifier, though the content may encompass broader Karenni language varieties.

Acknowledgments

This dataset was made possible by the journalists and broadcasters at Radio Free Asia (RFA) who produce and publish high-quality content in the languages of Myanmar.

Dataset Structure & Format

This dataset follows the WebDataset format. Each sample consists of two paired files inside a .tar.gz archive:

• XXXX.mp3 — the audio chunk (up to 15 seconds)
• XXXX.json — the corresponding metadata (UTF-8 JSON)

🟢 Minimum chunk duration: 1.15 seconds
🔴 Maximum chunk duration: 15.01 seconds

Each .json file contains a rich set of fields preserved from the original YouTube video:

{
  "__key__": "ZYmHR116xH0_chunk_0007",
  "file_name": "ZYmHR116xH0_chunk_0007.mp3",
  "title": "ကရင်နီတိုင်းရင်းသားဘာသာ အစီအစဉ်",
  "uploader": "RFA လွတ်လပ်တဲ့အာရှအသံ",
  "channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE75dgnEYPacknHHg3a3sJg",
  "upload_date": "20200811",
  "duration": 15.012,
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYmHR116xH0",
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/ZYmHR116xH0/maxresdefault.webp",
  "description": "ကရင်နီတိုင်းရင်းသားဘာသာ အစီအစဉ်...",
  "view_count": 314,
  "like_count": 1,
  "language": "kyu",
  "original_video_id": "ZYmHR116xH0"
}

Usage Example

You can easily stream this dataset using the Hugging Face datasets library. The streaming=True mode is highly recommended.

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "freococo/karenni_language_asr_audio",
    split="train",
    streaming=True
)

for sample in dataset.take(5):
    print(sample["audio"])          # Audio object with decoded waveform
    print(sample["json"]["title"])  # Access metadata from the JSON
    print(f"Duration: {sample['json']['duration']}s")

Known Limitations

This dataset was created using an automated pipeline and has the following characteristics:

• No Transcriptions: This dataset is audio-only and does not include text transcriptions.
• Background Noise: As the audio is sourced from news broadcasts, some segments may contain background music, jingles, or other non-speech sounds.
• No Speaker Labels: The dataset does not differentiate between different speakers within or across broadcasts.

Despite these limitations, this resource is invaluable for pre-training models like Wav2Vec2, developing voice activity detection systems, or performing other unsupervised speech research for the Karenni language.

Licensing & Use

This dataset contains audio content derived from the official YouTube channel of Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese. All original content is the exclusive property of RFA and is protected by copyright.

The use of this dataset is governed by the official RFA Terms of Use.

In summary, the content is made available for non-commercial, informational, and educational purposes only.

• Permitted Use: You may use this dataset for non-commercial research, personal projects, and educational applications.
• Prohibited Use: Any commercial use, including but not limited to training proprietary AI models for commercial products, is not permitted without explicit written permission from RFA.
• Required Attribution: When using or referencing this dataset, you must provide clear attribution to Radio Free Asia (RFA) as the original source of the content.

By using this dataset, you agree to abide by these terms.

📚 Citation

@dataset{freococo_karenni_language_asr_audio_2025,
  author    = {freococo},
  title     = {RFA Karenni (Kayah) Language Voices},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/freococo/karenni_language_asr_audio},
  note      = {Dataset compiled from Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese news broadcasts.}
}