Africa · Kenya
Swahili conversational speech dataset
2,000 hours of unscripted Swahili conversation between pairs of native speakers, 200 vetted speakers in all, recorded in Kenya. Every recording is dual-channel, one speaker per channel, and comes with a time-aligned, human-verified transcript, speaker metadata (age, gender, region and recording device) and signed consent records, under a commercial license for ASR, TTS and voice AI training.
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Dataset specifications
| Language | Swahili |
|---|---|
| Recorded in | Kenya |
| Speech type | Spontaneous two-person conversations |
| Volume | 2,000 hours |
| Speakers | 200 vetted native speakers |
| Audio | Dual-channel (one channel per speaker) |
| Transcripts | Time-aligned, human-verified |
| Metadata | Age, gender, region, recording device |
| License | Commercial (training & evaluation) |
| Price | $65 per hour of audio |
Need more hours, another dialect or your own recording setup? We collect speech data to spec.
Built for
For teams training or testing speech models that have to cope with real Swahili speech:
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR / STT)
- Text-to-speech and voice synthesis prosody
- Voice agents and IVR for Kenya
- Speaker diarization and turn-taking models
- Speech LLM and audio-understanding fine-tuning
Why conversational data?
Models trained on read speech lose accuracy on spontaneous audio, because hesitations, overlapping turns and natural speaking rates never made it into their training data. This dataset fills that gap for Swahili. Our guide to conversational speech data explains why it matters.
Free samples
Audit the Swahili data yourself
Leave your details and the Spirelight team will email representative audio, matching transcripts and the metadata schema within 48 hours. Check recording quality, transcript accuracy and the speaker mix before you commit to anything.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is in the Swahili speech dataset?
2,000 hours of unscripted conversation between pairs of native speakers, 200 vetted speakers in all, recorded in Kenya. Each conversation is delivered as dual-channel audio with a time-aligned transcript, speaker metadata (age, gender, region and recording device) and the consent records behind it.
What makes Swahili hard for speech recognition?
Swahili builds a word by wrapping prefixes and suffixes round a root, and noun classes drive agreement across the whole sentence. City speakers in Kenya blend it with English and Sheng slang, which costs accuracy for models trained on formal or Tanzanian Swahili.
Is the Swahili dataset licensed for commercial use?
Yes. The license covers commercial training and evaluation of ASR, TTS and other voice AI models. Every speaker signed explicit consent to commercial use, and Spirelight shares the full consent records for your legal review.
What does the Swahili speech dataset cost?
$65 per hour of audio. Buying the full dataset, or several languages together, qualifies for a volume discount: ask for a quote.
Can I check samples before I buy?
Yes. Request samples on this page and the Spirelight team emails representative audio, matching transcripts and the metadata schema within 48 hours, so your team can audit the data before committing.