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B BANTUNOMICS Stories
The connected-speech corpus

Page-length natural speech, in three modes, for every Bantu language.

Words and syllables are units. Stories are the only category where a model hears language connected — a whole page, read or spoken by a native voice. We capture every language on the same three modes, so the structure is legible before you download a single file.

01
Bantu only

Page-length native Bantu read aloud — gold-aligned connected speech and TTS voice.

02
Bantu & English

Interleaved Bantu↔English exactly as people speak — a labeled code-switch boundary in every take.

03
English only (accented)

The same neutral English text read by Bantu L1 speakers — the accent is the asset; frontier ASR trips on it.

4Languages
1145Consented takes
1504.9Minutes of speech
8Native speakers
The proof point

Frontier ASR trips on the accent.

Mode 3 reads the same neutral English text across many Bantu L1 speakers — a matched benchmark. We ran a frontier speech-to-text model over it and scored word-error rate against the known text. It mishears Bantu-accented English at a measurable rate. That gap is the asset.

Same text, different mouths

Content is held constant; accent is the only variable — so the WER is comparable across languages.

Mostly substitutions

The model hears the audio and picks the wrong word — a measured accent failure mode, not silence.

Bantu-accented English · Bemba
6.8%Word-error rate
93.2% word accuracy 27328 reference words scored (46 takes) Model: google-cloud-stt en-US/latest_long
Hear a public sample
Visiting Grandmother in the Village
Bemba-accented English · 675.3s · 759 words · ASR WER 10.4%

The value model

One recording does the work of six datasets.

A single consented Bantu–English story take is not one labelled example. Captured in one continuous take, its switch point is logged as switch_ms — so the record self-segments with no manual annotation, and one take becomes the ground truth for six things a lab would otherwise buy from six separate vendors.

Consented Take 48kHz Mono

Hear it proven live — a real consented take, and the datasets it yields: accent benchmark · the full 6-in-1.

License the connected-speech corpus, not a dataset.

Browse

Start with a language.

Every language is presented on the same three-mode frame. Empty modes stay visible as the next thing to record.

License the connected-speech corpus.

All three modes, every take, raw audio, and the reproduce-the-WER eval set — consented, de-identified, and growing. Evaluate it on your own models, then license the catalogue.

Access

Start where you are.

Prove it free, validate it on your own data, or license the whole program.

01 · Free
Evaluation

Score your model against the foundational layer — the Alphabet Test and the L26 Lite suite, with saved results. Self-serve, no cost.

Start evaluating →
Most labs start here
02 · 75 days
Validation Pilot

Three languages you choose — and everything we hold for them. Measured on your own held-out data.

Scope a pilot →
03 · Program
Full Annual Subscription

Every product, every language, the full consented corpus — and everything curated while you're subscribed.

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