Google NLP Hack Series: Intro to ASR Africa Challenge

Calling on the Zindi community to help create automatic speech recognition datasets for African languages
In this 2-month challenge, we invite participants to create a speech corpus in their language and train a speech recognition system on the data they collected.
Participants are encouraged to use the ASR data collection app from LIG-Aikuma, (see workshop resources below), which enables you to add text prompts on your phone and record them yourself or ask others to record them. Note: the LIG-Aikuma app only runs on Android, however it is not a requirement for this challenge and participants may use other collection methods (must be free and available to the public or created by yourself) or borrow an Android device to run the app.
Watch the workshop video here.
Resources
LIG-Aikuma: This is not needed for the workshop, but you’re welcome to download ahead of time if you want to reference it during the workshop.
Install the app from this APK file (easiest way is to download it on your phone)
We’ll cover instructions during the workshop and post more tutorial resources here after the workshop as well.
Update: Some are having issues with the Lig-Aikuma app crashing. The Lig-Aikuma app was suggested because it was open source and designed with ASR collection in mind, but you're welcome to use any speech recording app you'd like (even if it's not open source, as long as it's free and you're not paying for any of the features).
Here is another open source app, Simple Voice Recorder: play.google.com
And here is a list of other speech recorder apps (you're not limited to this list, you can use anything that's free and publicly available). You may want to try a few out to see which you like best: rev.com
Tip - When figuring out which app you'd like to use, some things you might want to consider are: Do I need the app to work offline and if so, can it work offline? Where does it store the data (do you want to store it to phone or SD card, and then transfer to computer or online storage)?
More resources for LIG-Aikuma app:
Install the app from this APK file (easiest way is to download it on your phone)
(If you want to download the entire source code, please scroll to the very bottom of this link: to the section called “#2021 Update on LIG-Aikuma source code".
Newest instructions for Lig-Aikuma app as mentioned in workshop
Original tutorial (available in English, French, and video)
ELPIS Tutorial Video
Metadata Template
Links referenced in workshop presentation:
Low Resource ASR
Semi-supervised learning, example paper: Improved low-resource Somali speech recognition by semi-supervised acoustic and language model training Biswas et al. 2019.
Multilingual modeling, example paper: Massively Multilingual ASR: 50 Languages, 1 Model, 1 Billion Parameters Pratap et al. 2020.
Collect and publish more data, example paper: “Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work”: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI Sambasivan et al. 2021.
Mozilla Common Voice
commonvoice.mozilla.org
LIG-Aikuma
User Guide
Elpis quick guide
Adapted from ELPIS: J. Wiles & B. Foley LADAL Opening Webinar Series 2021
Preparing the corpus
Python script for converting txt transcription files to Elan format (.eaf)
Using Elpis
elpis.readthedocs.io