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DONDO: Open ASR Models Released for 27 African Languages

By PulseAugur Editorial · [2 sources] ·

Researchers have introduced DONDO, a collection of open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR) models specifically designed for African languages. These models are built upon the w2v-BERT 2.0 architecture and include twenty-one monolingual and five multilingual versions, covering twenty-seven language varieties across six countries. The models were fine-tuned using religious texts and employ a novel language-conditioning mechanism, achieving average word error rates of 10-13% for multilingual families. All DONDO models are available on Hugging Face under the Apache-2.0 license, enabling free fine-tuning for various applications. AI

IMPACT Increases accessibility of speech recognition technology for numerous African languages, potentially accelerating AI adoption and research in these regions.

RANK_REASON Publication of a new set of open-source speech recognition models for underrepresented languages.

Read on Hugging Face Daily Papers →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 2 sources. How we write summaries →

DONDO: Open ASR Models Released for 27 African Languages

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Publication of a new set of open-source speech recognition models for underrepresented languages.
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model release, other
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55 days old
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COVERAGE [2]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Paul Azunre ·

    DONDO: Open w2v-BERT Speech-Recognition Base Models for African Languages

    arXiv:2607.21540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2.0 self-supervised speech encoder. DONDO comprises twenty-one monolingual models …

  2. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    DONDO: Open w2v-BERT Speech-Recognition Base Models for African Languages

    We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2.0 self-supervised speech encoder. DONDO comprises twenty-one monolingual models and five multilingual models spanning twenty-sev…

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