---
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
> If you encounter any issues with the processes below, please [create a discussion here](https://huggingface.co/datasets/naijavoices/naijavoices-dataset-compressed/discussions/new) and we will help.

#### 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).