Tolulope.ai: Advancing Speech and Language Technology for African Languages

Tolulope.ai is a research-driven AI initiative led by Tolúlọpẹ́ Ògúnrẹ̀mí, a Computer Science PhD Candidate at the Stanford NLP Group, dedicated to advancing natural language and speech processing for low-resource African languages—especially Yorùbá. The platform delivers high-quality, open-access speech datasets like the ÌròyìnSpeech corpus, which supports Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications, and includes tools such as an open-sourced Speech Recorder App to empower community-driven data collection. Designed for researchers, developers, and linguists passionate about inclusive AI, Tolulope.ai bridges critical gaps in multilingual NLP and fosters language preservation through innovative, accessible technology.

Key Features:

• ÌròyìnSpeech Corpus: A 50-hour, high-quality speech dataset for Yorùbá with over 23,000 curated text sentences from news and creative writing.
• Multilingual NLP Research: Focus on low-resource African languages with emphasis on codeswitching and multilingual self-supervised models.
• Open-Source Speech Recorder App: A tool designed to streamline and democratize speech data curation for underrepresented languages.
• Noise-Robust Speech Recognition: Advanced research using CPT-Boosted Wav2vec2.0 for improved performance in challenging acoustic environments.
• Language Revival Tools: Development of automated speech tools to support endangered or under-documented language revitalization efforts.
• Community-Driven Data Collection: Leverages crowdsourcing via Mozilla Common Voice to gather and validate speech recordings.
• Academic-Grade Data Quality: Dataset is published in the ELRA catalogue with ISLRN registration and validated through rigorous curation processes.
• Free and Accessible: All datasets and tools are freely available to researchers and developers worldwide.

Pricing: Tolulope.ai offers a Free tier with no cost for accessing its research datasets and open-source tools.

Conclusion: Tolulope.ai is a transformative force in inclusive AI, delivering vital speech and language resources for African languages while empowering researchers and communities to contribute to a more diverse and equitable future of natural language processing.