The Sauti Project
Advances in education, technology, and transportation have made the world small, with many of us from different cities, regions, and countries, speaking a hypercentric or global language. In such cases, speakers may have different accents, even when speaking the same language, making verbal communication and comprehension sometimes challenging.
In recent years, online courses and educational resources have become widely available, and are mostly taught in English Language. These courses are intended to be accessible to learners from all over the world, but students often met with the challenge of adjusting to the unfamiliar accent of the instructor in some cases. This imposes cognitive burden on students most impacted by this, and puts them at a disadvantage compared to their peers, whom might be familiar with the instructors's accent. This unequal access to information poses a great challenge to our society and thus students that are most affected by this may find it desirable to have online video content presented to them in an accent they are familiar with.
As such, there is a great opportunity to use technology to improve online teaching for learners and personalize individual's learning experience through the reformulation of educational contents in an accent of choice. For this reason, we have structured our project into 4 components as listed below. We welcome contribution in any of these areas and you can contact us via Email. Let us work together to advance speech research in Africa and across the world!
SautiDB
An accented speech corpora of non-native (African) English speakers.
SautiClean
A sweep of tools for postprocessing speech recordings.
SautiClassify
A model wrapped in an API to classify accent varieties.
SautiTranslate
A model wrapped in an API to aid smooth translation from one accent to another.
Please donate your voice to help us advance accented speech research!
Citation
Afonja, T., Iroro, O., Malomo, A., Mbataku, C., Mudele, O., Dukor, K., Azeez, O., Okubadejo, O., Nwadike, M.S., and Nandy, A. 2021. TheSautiProject.