DONDO: Open w2v-BERT Speech-Recognition Base Models for African Languages
We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2.0 self-supervised speech encoder. DONDO comprises twenty-one monolingual models and five multilingual models spanning twenty-seven language varieties across Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Models are fine-tuned primarily on read speech drawn from religious texts, which offer broad, license-clear and orthographically consistent coverage for languages that otherwise lack transcribed audio. We describe a two-step (and, for one family, three-step) learning-rate-annealed fine-tuning procedure that first adapts a share...
| Authors | Paul Azunre, Naafi Ibrahim, Joel Budu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 July 2026 |
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