triAI

Now open

Sauti Project · Ongoing research initiative

Learn more

News research

February 20, 2026

Sauti Project releases benchmark for African speech recognition

TRI AI's Sauti Project has published a new benchmark for speech recognition across five under-resourced African languages, alongside baseline results from contemporary self-supervised speech models.

The Sauti Project this week released a public benchmark for automatic speech recognition (ASR) across five under-resourced African languages, with paired baseline results from contemporary self-supervised speech models.

The benchmark - and the accompanying paper, published at the African NLP Workshop - is the result of more than a year of dataset construction, evaluation design, and community review. It is intended as a reusable evaluation harness for future African ASR work, not a one-off comparison.

The full paper, evaluation code, and dataset documentation are linked from the Publications page.

Newsletter

The Encoder.

Monthly programmes, research, and opportunities updates from The Encoder — a TRI AI Initiative