Single-speaker Dagbani (dag) text-to-speech: VITS/MMS-TTS fine-tuning pipeline, data inventory, and Colab notebook.
# Dagbani Text-to-Speech — Build Guide & Pipeline
A complete, Colab-ready pipeline to build a high-quality **single-speaker
Dagbani (`dag`) TTS** voice by fine-tuning a VITS / MMS-TTS model.
This repo contains:
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
| `DATA_INVENTORY.md` | Every usable Dagbani dataset + model found, tiered, with licenses. **Read this first.** |
| `Dagbani_TTS_Finetune_Colab.ipynb` | One-click-ish Colab notebook: install → data → train → listen. |
| `dagbani_text_normalize.py` | Dagbani text normalization (used at train **and** inference time). |
| `prepare_dagbani_dataset.py` | Download → clean → filter → split into a training `DatasetDict`. |
| `finetune_dagbani_vits.json` | Training config for `ylacombe/finetune-hf-vits`. |
| `synthesize_dagbani.py` | Inference: text → WAV with your fine-tuned model. |
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## TL;DR — the strategy
* **Meta MMS-TTS has no Dagbani checkpoint.** But a Dagbani VITS model already
exists (`FarmerlineML/dagbani_tts-2025_v2`, *the same architecture as MMS-TTS*).
So we **warm-start from that** and fine-tune on a clean single-speaker corpus.
* **Best clean-voice data** = the **Dagbani audio Bible** (one professional
narrator, 24 kHz, already force-aligned & VAD-trimmed):
`ghananlpcommunity/dagbani-bible-audio-text-tts` (~53k segments, CC-BY-4.0).
* **Avoid** the "navigation corpus" *as a voice target* — it is synthetic
(TTS-generated) and would teach the model its artifacts. Fine for text/ASR.
* **Don't** train a model you intend to release on **UGSpeechData** — its
CC-BY-NC-ND license forbids distributing derivatives.
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## Step-by-step (matches the notebook)
### 0. Runtime
In Colab: **Runtime → Change runtime type → GPU** (T4 is enough; L4/A100 faster).
### 1. Install the finetuner + build the alignment kernel
```bash
git clone
github.com
cd finetune-hf-vits
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install datasets[audio] librosa soundfile accelerate
# Build the Cython monotonic-alignment sear …