---
license: cc-by-sa-4.0
license_name: cc-by-nc-sa-4
language:
- ig
- yo
- ha
pretty_name: NaijaVoices
extra_gated_heading: "You need to register at NaijaVoices to use this dataset. It'll only take a minute" 
extra_gated_prompt: "Click [here](https://naijavoices.com/membership) to register on NaijaVoices in the tier that corresponds to your use case."
extra_gated_fields:
  First Name: text
  Last Name: text
  Email address (used during registration): text
  I have registered on NaijaVoices and obtained a membership: checkbox
---


### Introduction

Welcome to the NaijaVoices dataset. The NaijaVoices dataset consists of 1,800 hours of authentic speech (from over 5,000 diverse speakers!) and expert curated text in Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba. ~600 hours for each of the three languages. It also boasts of adequate female representation and balanced age-range distribution (young to old speakers). For more about the dataset info visit our website: [https://naijavoices.com/](https://naijavoices.com/). By using this dataset, you acknowledge reading and accepting to use this dataset accoridng to the [data usage terms and conditions](https://naijavoices.com/terms-and-conditions).

### Metadata
The `metadata.csv` file contains the metadata for all the audio files. Each row contains:

```
audio: the audio filename
text: the transcript of the audio
speaker_id: the id of the speaker. 
language: the language of the transcript (whether Igbo or Hausa or Yoruba)
age_bracket: the age-range  of the speaker
gender: the gender of the speaker
```

Load the csv like this:
```python
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('metadata.csv',sep='~')
```

### Usage
> By using this dataset, you agree to our [Terms and Conditions of usage](https://naijavoices.com/terms-and-conditions) outlining acceptable and prohibited uses, and acknowledge that any misuse may result in enforcement actions.

#### 1: Unzipping the audio files
The audio files are zipped in split zip files (`audio-files.zip` and `audio-files.z01`) due to storage limits. Therefore, follow the process below to correctly unzip and access the audio files: 

1. First of all, you need the `zip` package. You should have this already installed with many Linux distributions. If you need to install it, refer to [here](https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-use-zip-on-linux) for a comprehensive guide on installing it.
2. Since the zipping was split, we need to first use the zip command to combine the split zip files into a single zip archive (let's call it `audio.zip`). You do that by running `zip -F audio-files.zip --out audio.zip`
3. Finally use `unzip` package to unzip the `audio.zip` file: `unzip audio.zip`. Voilà! You can now view the audio files.

#### 2: Loading the audio files

To load the audio files in python, we have found the following process to work best given the nature of the audio data:
1. Use `librosa` package. You can install `librosa` with `pip install librosa`.
2. You also need to install `ffmpeg` because `librosa` will use the codec of `ffmpeg`. On Linux, you can simply do `sudo apt install ffmpeg`. You can refer [here](https://phoenixnap.com/kb/ffmpeg-windows) for a guide on installing `ffmpeg` on Windows OS.
3. Finally, to load an audio simply do:
  ```python
      audio_path = os.path.join(AUDIO_FOLDER,AUDIO_FILENAME) # AUDIO_FILENAME is from the `audio` column of the metadata.csv and AUDIO_FOLDER is the path to the unzipped audio file.
      audio, sr = librosa.load(audio_path, sr=48_000)
  ```

### License
Our dataset is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. For commercial interests, please [check out our membership tiers which offer special privileges](https://naijavoices.com/membership).

## Citation 📖
```bibtex
@inproceedings{emezue25_interspeech,
  title     = {The NaijaVoices Dataset: Cultivating Large-Scale, High-Quality, Culturally-Rich Speech Data for African Languages},
  author    = {Chris Emezue and NaijaVoices Community and Busayo Awobade and Abraham Owodunni and Sewade Ogun and Handel Emezue and Gloria Monica Tobechukwu Emezue and Nefertiti Nneoma Emezue and Bunmi Akinremi and David Adelani and Chris Pal},
  year      = {2025},
  booktitle = { },
  pages     = { },
  doi       = { },
  issn      = { },
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/naijavoices/naijavoices-dataset}
}
```