ovalentine964/moonshine-african-languages

Moonshine STT for African languages — Msaidizi # Moonshine African Languages **Building production-grade African language speech recognition for Msaidizi — at $0 cost.** ## What Is This? This project fine-tunes Moonshine AI (open-source STT) for 6 African languages spoken by Msaidizi's informal worker users. Msaidizi is Africa-first. Current models (Whisper, Google STT) are terrible at African dialects. Moonshine's architecture lets us build **adaptive, dialect-aware models** that learn from Msaidizi's users — something Whisper can never do. ## Datasets (6,500+ Hours FREE) The dataset landscape transformed in 2026. Every language Msaidizi needs now has massive free data: | Dataset | Hours | Languages | Source | |---------|-------|-----------|--------| | **AfriVoices-KE** (Maseno Univ, Apr 2026) | 3,000 | Dholuo, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Maasai, Somali | CC BY 4.0 | | **Thiomi Dataset** (Harvard, Apr 2026) | 1,500 | Swahili, Kikuyu, Kamba, Luo, Kipsigis + 5 more | CC BY 4.0 | | **Google WAXAL** (Feb 2026) | 1,485 | Swahili, Luo, Kikuyu + 21 more | CC BY 4.0 | | **Mozilla Common Voice** | 400+ | Swahili (200h+), Luo (120h), Kalenjin (92h) | CC0 | | **Kencorpus** (2023) | 177 | Swahili, Dholuo, Luhya | Open | **Every language has data. No more "collect first" — train everything now.** ## What Is This? This project fine-tunes Moonshine AI (open-source STT) for 6 African languages spoken by Msaidizi's informal worker users: | Language | Status | Mode | Data Source | |----------|--------|------|------------| | Swahili | 🟢 Ready to train | Full transcription | Common Voice + ALFFA + Thiomi + WAXAL (~600h+) | | Luo | 🟢 Ready to train | Full transcription | Common Voice (120h) + AfriVoices-KE + Thiomi + WAXAL | | Kikuyu | 🟢 Ready to train | Full transcription | AfriVoices-KE + Thiomi + WAXAL | | Kamba | 🟡 Has data | Command recognition | Thiomi Dataset (Harvard 2026) | | Luhya | 🟡 Has data | Command recognition | Kencorpus (177h) | | Kalenjin | 🟢 Ready to train | Command recognition | Common Voice (92h) + AfriVoices- …