SilencioNetwork/hausa-speech

Hausa Speech Dataset

Real-world speech from consenting contributors, recorded on their own devices in their own environments. Part of the Silencio corpus.

Hours	0.41
Clips	42
Speakers	5
Configs	1
Audio	48 kHz stereo WAV, as captured
Transcripts	none in this release — human-validated transcription available on demand
Licence	cc-by-nc-4.0

This release ships audio and speaker metadata only — it does not include transcripts.

Human-validated transcription is available on demand for this data. Word-level forced alignment included, as shipped in cebuano-speech and tagalog-filipino-speech. Available for this sample, for a larger subset of the same language, or for commissioned collection — info@silencio.network

Load it

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("SilencioNetwork/hausa-speech", "hausa_nigeria", split="train")
print(ds[0])

Requires pip install "datasets>=4.0" and FFmpeg ≥ 4.

Configs: hausa_nigeria

Speaker and recording metadata

Speaker origin / variety	Speakers	%
Nigeria - Kano	2	40.0%
Nigeria - Katsina	2	40.0%
Nigeria - Nigerian Standard	1	20.0%

Gender	Speakers	%
male	4	80.0%
female	1	20.0%

Device	Clips	%
Mobile	37	88.1%
Desktop	5	11.9%

Environment	Clips	%
home	34	81.0%
cafe	5	11.9%
outdoor	2	4.8%
restaurant	1	2.4%

Human-validated transcription — available on demand

This release is not human-transcribed. Silencio provides human transcription with word-level forced alignment on demand, over this sample or over a larger subset of the same language, and as part of commissioned collection.

These releases show exactly what that deliverable looks like — human transcript text, machine forced alignment, per-token start and end times:

• SilencioNetwork/cebuano-speech — Cebuano (Bisaya) Spontaneous Speech
• SilencioNetwork/tagalog-filipino-speech — Tagalog / Filipino Spontaneous Speech

To request transcription over this data or any other Silencio subset: info@silencio.network

Limitations

• Sample scale. 42 clips, 5 speakers, 0.41 hours. This is a demonstration sample, not a training corpus.
• No transcripts. Audio and speaker metadata only. See above.
• Gender imbalance. 4 of 5 speakers are male. Do not use this release for gender-comparative work. Balanced cohorts are available through the collection programme.
• Few speakers. 5 contributors, so speaker-level conclusions are not supportable.
• No acoustic annotation. Recording environment, background-noise class and SNR are not annotated in this release. Available for commissioned collection.
• Audio is 48 kHz stereo WAV as captured. Resample and downmix before batching.
• No baseline. No reference WER is published with this release.

Provenance and consent

Every recording is contributed by an opted-in participant through the Silencio app, under a consent record covering AI/ML training use. Contributors can request deletion, and deletion propagates to downstream releases. Full provenance documentation is available to licensees.

License

cc-by-nc-4.0 — free for research and non-commercial use with attribution.

Attribution string: Silencio Network, Hausa Speech Dataset, 2026. CC BY-NC 4.0.

Non-commercial covers research, evaluation and publication. Benchmarking a commercial product model against this data is a commercial use and needs a licence — ask, it is usually granted for evaluation. Model weights trained on this sample inherit the non-commercial restriction.

Commercial licensing: info@silencio.network

Citation

@misc{silencio_hausa_speech_2026,
  title  = {Hausa Speech Dataset},
  author = {Silencio Network},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/SilencioNetwork/hausa-speech}
}

Silencio corpus and collection network

Two distinct figures, because they answer different questions.

Recorded and available off the shelf — audio already collected, with metadata, licensable today:

Hours recorded	127,793
Recordings	9,392,870
Contributors who recorded	222,145
Languages	156
Countries and territories of origin	216

Contributor network available for commissioned collection — registered, consented contributors who can be activated for a specific brief. These are not active contributors to the corpus above; they are the pool it is drawn from and extended through:

Registered contributors	2,000,000+
Countries	180+
Languages reachable	250+

For volume licensing, human transcription over an existing subset, or commissioned collection in a language not listed: info@silencio.network