CLEAR-Global/BibleTTS-Luo

BibleTTS Luo — Aligned Bible Speech

77.4 hours of studio-quality, single-speaker Dholuo (Luo) Bible narration, segmented and force-aligned at verse level into 40,972 clips (24 kHz, mono, WAV).

Languages

• luo — Dholuo (Luo)

Dataset Structure

Audio is stored in the audio column (HuggingFace Audio feature). Parquet shards live under data/read/, one file per split.

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("CLEAR-Global/BibleTTS-Luo", "read", split="train")

field	description
audio	The clip. audio.path is the source file name, <BOOK>_<chapter>_<segment>.wav.
text	Verse transcript, lowercase.
duration	Clip duration in seconds.
score	Alignment confidence for the clip (see below).

Statistics

split	clips	hours	median / p95 duration (s)
train	40,592	76.49	5.9 / 14.1
dev	267	0.70	8.5 / 20.6
test	113	0.22	6.4 / 14.7
total	40,972	77.41	5.9 / 14.2

The corpus has a single speaker (one recording voice) and no speaker or demographic metadata.

Splits and the Alignment Score

Each clip carries a score from the forced aligner: the alignment confidence for that clip, expressed as an average per-token log-probability. Values are negative; higher is better. It is length-normalised, so long and short clips are comparable.

Dataset Creation

BibleTTS's Luo subset was published as unaligned chapter-level audio from Open.Bible released by Biblica. This release is the CLEAR Global verse-level segmentation of those recordings: each chapter was split into per-verse clips and force-aligned against the Dholuo Bible text, which yielded the per-clip transcripts, durations and alignment scores used here. The source archives 41,846 clips; the 874 that failed alignment entirely (score <= -140) are not part of this release, leaving 40,972. Clips are 24 kHz mono PCM WAV.

TTS models

This dataset was used to train the Dholuo TTS models (YourTTS and XTTS) in the Luo (Dholuo) TTS models collection.

Similar datasets from CLEAR Global and collaborators

• Luo Synthetic ASR Dataset — synthetic Dholuo speech for ASR.
• TWB Luo (Kenya) — read speech for ASR.

Caveats

• Single speaker, Bible-domain vocabulary: not representative of everyday spoken Dholuo.
• Verse-level segmentation follows the Bible text; some clips are verse fragments, so transcripts are not always complete sentences.

Citation

@inproceedings{meyer22c_interspeech,
  title     = {{BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus}},
  author    = {Josh Meyer and David Adelani and Edresson Casanova and Alp Öktem and Daniel Whitenack and Julian Weber and Salomon {KABONGO KABENAMUALU} and Elizabeth Salesky and Iroro Orife and Colin Leong and Perez Ogayo and Chris {Chinenye Emezue} and Jonathan Mukiibi and Salomey Osei and Apelete AGBOLO and Victor Akinode and Bernard Opoku and Olanrewaju Samuel and Jesujoba Alabi and Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad},
  year      = {2022},
  booktitle = {{Interspeech 2022}},
  pages     = {2383--2387},
  doi       = {10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10850},
  issn      = {2958-1796},
}

@inproceedings{derenzi-etal-2025-synthetic,
  title     = "Synthetic Voice Data for Automatic Speech Recognition in {A}frican Languages",
  author    = "DeRenzi, Brian and Dixon, Anna and Farhi, Mohamed Aymane and Resch, Christian",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing {NLP} for Low-Resource Languages",
  month     = sep,
  year      = "2025",
  address   = "Varna, Bulgaria",
  publisher = "INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria",
  url       = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.lowresnlp-1.16/",
  pages     = "152--186"
}

Contact

CLEAR Global — tech@clearglobal.org

Acknowledgments

Verse-level alignment and packaging by CLEAR Global, continuing the Masakhane BibleTTS collaboration. Original recordings from the Open.Bible project by Biblica.

License

CC BY-SA 4.0 (SPDX: cc-by-sa-4.0)