AfriSpeech-Parliament: Transcribed Parliamentary Sessions from Four African Nations

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Overview

AfriSpeech-Parliament is a 35.86-hour dataset of transcribed parliamentary sessions from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya. Sourced from their respective official YouTube channels, each sample is a 16-second audio chunk with corresponding manual transcription. The data reflects natural, conversational speech with background noise, overlapping speakers, and crosstalk — capturing the realistic complexity of parliamentary sessions. This dataset is a test-only dataset that can be used to evaluate the robustness of ASR models to noisy, multi-speaker, real-world African-accented conversational speech.

Each sample includes:

• file_name: Audio file path
• transcript: Full transcription
• country: One of GH, KE, ZA, or NG
• accent: Assigned based on country of parliament session
• duration: Duration in seconds (always 16.0s)
• age_group: Annotator's age group

Dataset Summary

Country	No. of Samples
Kenya	3,892
Nigeria	1,818
South Africa	1,805
Ghana	553
Total	8,068

• Total duration: 35.86 hours
• Sample duration: 16 seconds (for all samples)
• Sample rate: 16kHz, monochannel
• Format: .wav audio with plain-text transcription

Data Split

This is a test-only dataset and does not include train/dev splits.

How to Load the Dataset

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("intronhealth/afrispeech-parliament")