Afrika Labs
Afrika Labs (https://afrikalabs.org) — open speech-to-text for Kikuyu (Gĩkũyũ, ~8M speakers, my mother tongue), as a start, then other African languages. Almost none of Africa's 2,000+ languages have working ASR. I'm fine-tuning Whisper on ~217h of transcribed Kikuyu (no Kikuyu token exists, so I'm repurposing the Swahili one). A recent paper hit ~26% WER with similar data, so a usable v0 is realistic.