M-Kiriku ASR: Multilingual Speech Recognition for Senegal

The first open-source multilingual ASR model covering Wolof, Pulaar, and Sérère three of Senegal's most widely spoken national languages.

M-Kiriku ASR is a fine-tuned version of openai/whisper-large-v3 developed by IA Hub Senegal.

The model is built upon a subset of the Kallama Speech Dataset. We started from approximately 90 hours of multilingual recordings from the Kallama project that had **not previously undergone linguistic review **.

Since these recordings originate from radio broadcasts and conversations, IA Hub Senegal first carried out an extensive audio preprocessing pipeline to improve data quality. This included removing music, jingles, background noise, and other non-speech segments before linguistic validation.

After audio cleaning, IA Hub Senegal performed transcription review, linguistic validation, and quality assurance, resulting in a high-quality 75.4-hour multilingual corpus composed of:

• 34.9 hours of Wolof
• 24.3 hours of Sérère
• 16.2 hours of Pulaar

To train M-Kiriku ASR, this curated corpus was merged with existing open-source speech datasets from the community, including Google FLEURS, Alpha, Urban, Wolof Banking, and other publicly available resources. The resulting multilingual training corpus totals approximately 150 hours of speech.

By combining newly curated data from the Kallama project with existing open datasets, M-Kiriku ASR provides one of the largest open multilingual ASR resources for Senegalese languages and aims to accelerate speech technology research and development across West Africa.

Why This Matters

Wolof, Pulaar, and Sérère are low-resource languages with zero native support in the original Whisper vocabulary. These three languages alone cover over 80% of Senegal's population, yet remain invisible to mainstream speech technology.

M-Kiriku ASR doesn't just fine-tune weights — it expands the model's fundamental capabilities:

• Custom Vocabulary: Injected language-specific characters (ñ, ë, ŋ, ɗ, ɓ, ƴ) and custom language tokens (<|wo|>, <|pu|>, <|se|>) into the tokenizer.
• Smart Initialization: Used warm-starting from French <|fr|> embeddings to give the decoder a linguistic head-start, leveraging shared phonological features (CV syllable structure, nasal vowels).
• 150h Expert Corpus: Trained on three curated datasets spanning agriculture, banking, urban life, and daily conversation.
• Text Normalization: A custom SenegalNormalizer standardizes orthographic variants, Unicode inconsistencies, and punctuation across all three languages.
• Discriminative Learning Rate: The encoder (acoustic features) learns at half the rate of the decoder (language generation), preserving Whisper's universal audio understanding while rapidly adapting text generation to new languages.

Performance & Results

M-Kiriku ASR achieves benchmark-setting Word Error Rates across all three target languages.

Training Configuration

Quick Start

Simple Transcription

import torch
import librosa
from transformers import WhisperProcessor, WhisperForConditionalGeneration

MODEL_ID = "AIHubSN/m-kiriku-asr"
device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"

processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained(MODEL_ID)
model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
    MODEL_ID, torch_dtype=torch.float16
).to(device)

# Load audio at 16kHz
audio, sr = librosa.load("audio.wav", sr=16000)

# Prepare features
input_features = processor.feature_extractor(
    audio, sampling_rate=sr, return_tensors="pt"
).input_features.to(device, dtype=torch.float16)

# Transcribe
with torch.no_grad():
    generated_ids = model.generate(input_features, max_new_tokens=440)

text = processor.batch_decode(generated_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]
print(text)

Specifying Language

M-Kiriku ASR uses custom language tokens (<|wo|>, <|pu|>, <|se|>) that are not part of the standard Whisper vocabulary. To force a specific language, pass decoder_input_ids directly:

# Build the decoder prompt for Wolof
sot_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|startoftranscript|>")
wo_id  = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|wo|>")   # or <|pu|> / <|se|>
task_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|transcribe|>")
nots_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|notimestamps|>")

decoder_input_ids = torch.tensor([[sot_id, wo_id, task_id, nots_id]]).to(device)

with torch.no_grad():
    generated_ids = model.generate(
        input_features,
        decoder_input_ids=decoder_input_ids,
        max_new_tokens=440,
    )

text = processor.batch_decode(generated_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]

Note: Do not use the language= parameter of the standard Whisper pipeline — it does not recognize wo, pu, or se. Always use decoder_input_ids for language control.

Transcribing Long Audio (> 30 seconds)

Whisper processes a maximum of 30 seconds per inference. For longer audio, chunk with overlap to avoid cutting words at boundaries:

import math

def transcribe_long(audio_path, lang_code="wo"):
    audio, sr = librosa.load(audio_path, sr=16000)
    duration = len(audio) / sr

    # Chunk with 5s overlap
    chunk_sec, overlap = 30, 5
    step = chunk_sec - overlap

    # Prepare decoder prompt
    sot_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|startoftranscript|>")
    lang_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids(f"<|{lang_code}|>")
    task_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|transcribe|>")
    nots_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|notimestamps|>")
    decoder_ids = torch.tensor([[sot_id, lang_id, task_id, nots_id]]).to(device)

    texts = []
    for i in range(max(1, math.ceil((duration - overlap) / step))):
        start = i * step
        end = min(start + chunk_sec, duration)
        chunk = audio[int(start * sr):int(end * sr)]

        if len(chunk) < sr * 0.5:
            continue

        features = processor.feature_extractor(
            chunk, sampling_rate=sr, return_tensors="pt"
        ).input_features.to(device, dtype=torch.float16)

        with torch.no_grad():
            ids = model.generate(features, decoder_input_ids=decoder_ids, max_new_tokens=440)

        texts.append(processor.batch_decode(ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0].strip())

    return " ".join(texts)

print(transcribe_long("long_audio.wav", lang_code="se"))  # Sérère

Production Deployment with Faster-Whisper

For high-throughput deployment, convert to CTranslate2 with INT8 quantization (~4× faster):

pip install faster-whisper
ct2-whisper-converter --model AIHubSN/m-kiriku-asr --output_dir m-kiriku-ct2 --quantization int8

from faster_whisper import WhisperModel

model = WhisperModel("m-kiriku-ct2", device="cuda", compute_type="int8")
segments, info = model.transcribe("audio.wav", vad_filter=True)

for segment in segments:
    print(f"[{segment.start:.1f}s → {segment.end:.1f}s] {segment.text}")

Architecture

M-Kiriku ASR is a standard Whisper encoder-decoder Transformer with the following modifications:

• Encoder: 32 Transformer layers processing 128-bin log-Mel spectrograms (1500 frames per 30s of audio). Pretrained weights from OpenAI, fine-tuned at reduced learning rate (1e-5) to preserve acoustic representations.
• Decoder: 32 Transformer layers with causal self-attention and cross-attention to the encoder. Fine-tuned at full learning rate (2e-5) to learn the three target languages.
• Vocabulary: Extended from 51,866 to 51,873 tokens (+7: ŋ, ɗ, ɓ, ƴ, <|wo|>, <|pu|>, <|se|>).
• Language Token Initialization: <|wo|>, <|pu|>, <|se|> embeddings warm-started from <|fr|> (French), leveraging shared CV syllable structure and nasal vowels between French and Senegalese languages.

Limitations

• Pulaar and Sérère have higher WER due to limited training data (25h and 34h respectively). Performance will improve significantly with more data.
• Dialectal variation within each language (e.g., Pulaar Fuuta vs. Pulaar Jeeri) is not fully covered.
• Standard Whisper pipeline does not support the custom language tokens. Use decoder_input_ids for language specification (see Quick Start above).

Produced By

This project is a testament to Senegalese AI excellence:

• AI Hub Senegal Coordination, linguistic validation, community mobilization, and project support.
• Contact: contact@aihubsenegal.com

Citation & Attribution

If you use M-Kiriku ASR in your research, products, benchmarks, publications, or demonstrations, please acknowledge AI Hub Senegal by citing this repository and mentioning AI Hub Senegal.

We kindly ask users to include an acknowledgement such as:

"M-Kiriku ASR, developed by AI Hub Senegal."

Your citation helps recognize the work of the contributors and supports the continued development of open-source AI resources for African languages.

Citation

@misc{iahubsn2026m_kiriku_asr,
  title        = {M-Kiriku ASR: Whisper Large-v3 Fine-tuned for Wolof, Pulaar, and S\'{e}r\`{e}re},
  author       = {IA Hub Senegal},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/AIHubSN/m-kiriku-asr}},
  note         = {Fine-tuned on ~150 hours of expert-verified multilingual Senegalese speech}
}

Developed with 🤍 in Dakar for the African AI Renaissance.