Do you have a way to demo the voice without downloading and running the model? The Huggingface playback doesn't work.
Sounds like your project is for southern American English presumably including African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and for regional accents in the African continent specifically for the English language.<p>But tangentially related, for non-English languages of the African continent, the Gates Foundation are pledging some grants to improve AI access outside of English-speaking regions: <a href="https://news.bpdata.com/article/gates-foundation-pledges-1-billion-to-boost-ai-for-africa-53c5831b" rel="nofollow">https://news.bpdata.com/article/gates-foundation-pledges-1-b...</a><p>Despite being focused on English, your project could be of interest for their funding. It's probably worth reaching out to let them know about your work.
Seeing Atlanna inspire an open weight model was not on my 2026 bingo card.
congrats, this is a very exciting release.<p>I cannot speak to the other accents, but my experience has been that American south accents are really poorly represented in mainstream Speach-To-Text models. If your STT model is pointed at end users, this can cause quite a quality drift when looking at eval vs prod performance depending on who your user base is.<p>I am not sure what terms you have collected the speach data on, but I am sure there are lots of people working with voice models that would be very interested in this as an eval set.
AAVE was an awful term, but "Regional African English" and "Afro-English" is even worse if you're trying to talk about black Americans.<p>Are you talking about the English of Africans in different parts of Africa? If so, are you including the voices of white and Mediterranean Africans?<p>I'm confused. As a black American with roots (going back a couple centuries) in the Ark-La-Tex, I would think our dialects would be covered under "Southern American," which makes me suspect that you were referring to me with all of those references to another continent.
Wow this is really cool. AAVE and Southern lexes have been underserved linguistically for a long time.<p>That said, my hunch is your Africa speicifc datasets might lossy, as entire regions of Africa are very linguistically diverse and someone who speaks Bambara and French will affect a different English accent than someone who speaks Maninka and English.
Regional African English accents, so Nigerian, Kenyan, South African?
Southern American? It's Argentine or Chilean?
You're thinking of "South America" (parse as "South America + n", or "from South America").
Given the context of "American English" and "Atlanta", I'm assuming they're referring to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English</a>
I agree, but I wasted like 5 minutes parsing the title.<p>(I imagine that it has the errors and bad pronunciation of a tipical Latam person, that is different for example from the errors and bad pronunciation of a tipical Spanish person)