Kiriku ASR: Breaking the Silence for Wolof
The largest open-source Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model for the Wolof language.
Kiriku-ASR is a state-of-the-art fine-tune of whisper-large-v2. Developed by IA Hub Senegal, this model represents a massive leap forward for West African speech technology.
Why This Matters
Wolof is a low-resource language with zero native support in the original Whisper vocabulary. Kiriku ASR doesn't just fine-tune weights; it expands the model's fundamental understanding:
- Custom Vocabulary: Manually injected Wolof-specific characters (
ñ,ë,ŋ,ɗ,ɓ,ƴ) into the tokenizer. - Smart Initialization: Used "Warm-Starting" from French
<|fr|>embeddings to give the model a linguistic head-start. - Massive Expert Corpus: Trained on 88.27 hours of expert-verified speech—the largest open-source effort for Wolof to date.
- Free-Transcription Mode: Optimized to operate without a forced language token, avoiding the common "hallucination" artifacts found in base models.
Performance & Results
Through rigorous optimization and data augmentation, Kiriku ASR achieves a benchmark-setting Word Error Rate (WER) for the region.
| Metric | Score | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Best WER | 20.70% | New Open Source SOTA for Wolof |
| Training Data | 88.27h | Multi-domain (Agriculture, Banking, Urban) |
| Base Model | Whisper Large-v2 | Enhanced with custom Wolof diacritics |
Training Configuration
- Learning Rate: 1e-5 (Cosine schedule)
- Batch Size: 16 (Effective)
- Regularization: Dropout 0.1 to prevent overfitting on low-resource data.
- Augmentation: Gaussian noise, time stretching, and pitch shifting for real-world robustness.
Quick Start
You can start transcribing Wolof immediately using the Hugging Face pipeline API:
from transformers import pipeline
# Load Kiriku ASR
asr = pipeline(
"automatic-speech-recognition",
model="AIHubSN/kiriku-ASR",
device=0
)
# Transcribe (Ensure audio is sampled at 16kHz)
result = asr("audio_sample_wolof.wav")
print(result["text"])
Produced By
This project is a testament to Senegalese AI excellence:
- AI Hub Senegal — Coordination, community mobilization, and project support
- Contact: contact@aihubsenegal.com
Citation
If this work helps your research or application, please cite our efforts:
@misc{iahubsn2026kiriku_asr,
title = {Kiriku ASR: Whisper Large-v2 Fine-tuned for Wolof},
author = {{IA Hub Senegal},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/AIHubSN/kiriku-ASR}},
note = {Fine-tuned on 88.27 hours of expert-verified Wolof speech}
}
Developed with 🤍 in Dakar for the African AI Renaissance.