Hausa speech dataset, roughly 500 hours ready to license
Our OTS Hausa speech dataset is roughly 500 hours of Hausa speech, prompts and conversations, already recorded by Hausa speakers in our 30,000+ network, with consent from every speaker for commercial AI training. License it now and train your Hausa speech recognition model without waiting on a new collection.
- ~500 h of Hausa in stock
- ~35,000 h across the OTS pool
- 100% of speakers consented
- ISO 27001 certified
- SOC 2 report under NDA
- GDPR DPAs and HIPAA BAAs on request
What's in the Hausa speech dataset?
The IndecalAI OTS Hausa speech dataset is roughly 500 hours of Hausa speech, prompts and conversations, recorded by Hausa speakers in our network who all consented to commercial AI training. It's already recorded, so you can license it now instead of waiting on a new collection.
Hausa is one of Africa's most spoken languages and the key to northern Nigeria, a huge mobile market. Speech data for it is scarce, which makes licensed hours valuable.
Every recording comes with a transcript and metadata about the speaker, the device and the setting, and you can take it as WAV, OGG or another common format. Every order starts with sample clips and a spec sheet, so you can match the data against your model before you agree a licence.
Need more than what's in stock? Hausa speakers from our 30,000+ network record new speech to your brief, and our Hausa data page covers what we collect to order.
Hausa speech dataset at a glance
- Hours
- Roughly 500 hours, already recorded
- Language
- Hausa (Harshen Hausa), ha
- Content
- Speech, prompts and conversations
- Consent
- Every speaker consented to commercial AI training
- Speakers
- Hausa speakers from our 30,000+ network
- Audio and transcripts
- Transcripts and metadata with every recording, in WAV, OGG and more
- Licence
- Terms agreed with each customer, in writing
- Price
- Quoted per order
- Samples
- Hausa sample clips sent in reply to your request
- Security
- ISO 27001 certified. SOC 2 report available under NDA. GDPR DPAs and HIPAA BAAs on request.
What comes with every Hausa recording
Recorded on the devices and in the places your users actually speak, and delivered in the format your pipeline expects.
| Detail | In the Hausa dataset |
|---|---|
| Speech types | A mix of scripted prompts and natural conversations |
| Recording devices | Mobile phones, laptops and studio microphones |
| Environments | Quiet rooms and noisy, everyday settings |
| Transcripts | Included with every recording |
| Speaker metadata | Speaker details, such as gender and age, for each recording |
| Recording metadata | The device and the setting for each recording |
| Audio formats | WAV, OGG and other common formats |
| Sample rates | Listed for each recording on the spec sheet |
What roughly 500 hours of Hausa speech looks like
Roughly 500 hours sounds abstract until you play it: about 21 days of Hausa speech without a pause. That's why we send sample clips and a spec sheet first, so you can judge the whole from a part.
- ~500 hours of Hausa speech
- ~30,000 minutes
- ~1.8M seconds of audio
- ~21 days, played back to back
Hours here are recorded audio. When you compare quotes, check whether each one counts audio hours or only the parts where someone is talking.
Hausa at a glance, for speech teams
The facts that shape a Hausa speech project, from who speaks it to how it's written. Our Hausa data page covers what we collect to order.
Speakers
~94 million
people speak Hausa as a first or second language, about 58 million of them natively (Ethnologue, 2026).
Where it's spoken
Nigeria and Niger
Spoken across northern Nigeria and Niger, and as a trade language across West Africa.
Script
Latin alphabet (Boko)
Written in Latin letters with hooked letters like ɓ, ɗ and ƙ. Ajami, an Arabic-based script, is also used.
Family
Chadic
A Chadic language in the Afro-Asiatic family.
Varieties
Regional
Kano speech is the standard, with eastern and western varieties in Nigeria and Niger.
Codes
ha · hau
ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-3 codes. Locales speech APIs often use: ha-NG, ha-NE.
Hausa speech dataset, voice dataset or speech corpus?
Speech dataset, voice dataset, corpus: the names overlap. Here's how they differ, and where our Hausa data sits.
Hausa speech dataset
The general term
Recorded Hausa speech with details about each recording, for training and testing speech models. The name this page uses.
Hausa voice dataset
Usually the same thing
Some teams mean voice for text-to-speech or speaker recognition, which needs cleaner audio. Part of our data was recorded in a studio, so ask for those recordings.
Hausa audio dataset
A wider term
It can include music or background sound. Ours is speech audio: Hausa speech, prompts and conversations.
Hausa speech corpus
The research name
A structured collection of recordings and their details. Commercial datasets are corpora too, licensed instead of published.
Hausa ASR or speech-to-text dataset
Speech plus what was said
For training a model that turns Hausa audio into text. Every recording in our Hausa dataset comes with a transcript.
Hausa speech recognition data
Speech plus what was said
For training a model that turns Hausa audio into text. Every recording in our Hausa dataset comes with a transcript.
What makes Hausa hard for speech recognition
These are the things a Hausa speech model trips on, and what to listen for in any Hausa sample, ours included.
English words inside Hausa
Hausa speakers in cities mix in English for tech, money and work. A model trained only on formal Hausa stumbles on that, so listen for it in a sample.
Hooked letters and tone
Hausa uses hooked letters that change words, and tone and vowel length aren't usually written. Check that the transcripts keep the letters your model needs.
Accents across Hausa speakers
Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto and Niger speech carry different sounds and words. Check that the speaker mix covers the regions your users come from.
Tone and vowel length
Hausa is tonal, and vowel length changes words, but neither is shown in everyday writing. A model needs real speech to learn them.
What teams build with a Hausa speech dataset
Common uses for Hausa speech that's already recorded. They show the kind of work, and they aren't client names.
Hausa speech recognition
Train or fine-tune a Hausa speech-to-text model, or adapt a multilingual model so it handles Hausa well.
Voice bots and IVR
Teach a voice bot how Hausa callers actually ask for things, in the words and accents they use.
Customer service calls
Hausa speech for models that route, transcribe or summarize customer calls about accounts, orders and claims.
Voice in the car and at home
A Hausa base for in-car assistants and smart devices, before recording commands in the real setting.
Support and speech analytics
Hausa conversations for models that find intent, sentiment or topics in support calls and chats.
Testing a Hausa model
Held-back Hausa recordings your model never trained on, to measure word and character error rate before launch.
How many hours of Hausa speech do you need?
It depends on the model you start from and how close your users sound to the training data. These are rough starting points that come up often in speech work. Your own tests should decide.
| Goal | Rough starting point | With our Hausa data |
|---|---|---|
| Test a model you already have | A few hours your model never trained on | A test set cut from stock and kept out of training |
| Fine-tune a multilingual model, such as Whisper or wav2vec 2.0 | Tens to a few hundred hours | Roughly 500 hours in stock covers it |
| Adapt to one domain, like banking calls | A smaller set that sounds like your users | Stock as a base, plus a custom top-up in your domain |
| Train a Hausa model from scratch | Thousands of hours | Stock as a base, plus a larger custom collection |
Free Hausa speech datasets or a licensed one?
Public corpora such as Mozilla Common Voice, FLEURS and research Hausa speech corpora have done a lot for Hausa speech research. They cover what their creators chose to record, like read sentences, crowd recordings or broadcast speech, and each comes with its own licence and terms of use. Here's how they compare with a licensed dataset.
| Topic | Public Hausa corpora | Our Hausa speech dataset |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Set by each corpus, and some limit redistribution or changes | Agreed with you in writing, for what you're building |
| Consent | Covered by each project's own terms | Every speaker consented to commercial AI training |
| What it sounds like | Whatever the project recorded | Speech, prompts and conversations, with sample clips first |
| Who else trains on it | Anyone who downloads it | Set in the licence we agree with you |
| Filling gaps | Up to you | Recorded to your brief by the same network |
| Support | Community forums | A named contact from sample to delivery |
How to check a Hausa speech sample
Half an hour with the Hausa clips and the spec sheet answers most questions. The list works for any vendor, not only us.
| Check | What to look for | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Accents | Speakers from the regions your users come from | The speaker mix on the spec sheet, and the clips |
| Everyday speech | The way your users really talk, including any mixing with other languages | Listen to the clips |
| Script | Transcripts in the script and spelling your model should output | The transcript format on the spec sheet |
| Audio | A sample rate and recording setup close to your product | The sample rate on the spec sheet |
| Numbers | Amounts, dates and phone numbers written one consistent way | Transcripts of the clips |
| Rights | Consent that covers commercial AI training, and a licence that fits | Ask for the licence terms before you buy |
From Hausa sample clips to licensed data
Your named contact runs it from the first question to delivery.
-
01
Ask
Tell us how many Hausa hours you need and what the model is for.
You get A reply within one business day
-
02
Sample and spec sheet
We send Hausa sample clips and the spec sheet in reply.
You get Hausa clips and the spec sheet
-
03
Licence and quote
We agree the licence terms and send a quote for the order.
You get Written licence terms and a quote
-
04
Delivery
The licensed Hausa speech is delivered to you.
You get Licensed Hausa speech with transcripts
-
05
Fill the gaps
Accents, devices or domains that are missing get recorded to your brief.
You get New Hausa speech, recorded to your brief
Get Hausa sample clips Start with the sample clips, then decide.
Hausa speech data terms
The words that come up when you buy or build Hausa speech data. The full glossary covers every data type.
- Boko
- Hausa written in Latin letters, the everyday script in Nigeria.
- Ajami
- Hausa written in an Arabic-based script, used in religious and older texts.
- Implosive
- A consonant made by drawing air in, like Hausa ɓ and ɗ.
- Speaker metadata
- Details recorded about each speaker, such as gender and age, that let you check the speaker mix against your users.
- OTS dataset
- Short for off-the-shelf dataset: data already collected and ready to license before a buyer asks for it, instead of recorded to one buyer's brief.
- Word error rate (WER)
- The share of words a speech model gets wrong against a reference transcript. Lower is better.
- Character error rate (CER)
- The same idea counted in characters, often used alongside WER, since small spelling differences can make WER look worse than the model is.
- Utterance
- One stretch of speech by one speaker, such as a single prompt read aloud or one turn in a conversation.
More Hausa and speech data
Every language in stock is on the off-the-shelf speech datasets page. Related speech datasets: Yoruba, Igbo and Arabic.
OTS speech datasets
Around 35,000 hours across languages, ready to license.
Hausa data to your brief
Hausa speech, text and translation, collected to order.
Transcription
Hausa audio turned into timed text, checked by people.
Languages
100 languages, collected to order.
Data and model evaluation
Held-back Hausa speech scored against your targets.
Questions about the Hausa speech dataset
Straight answers about licensing Hausa speech. The off-the-shelf FAQ covers questions that apply to every language.
Do you have a Hausa speech dataset ready to license?
Yes. Roughly 500 hours of Hausa speech, prompts and conversations are already recorded and ready to license, as part of our off-the-shelf speech pool.
What's in the Hausa speech dataset?
A mix of scripted prompts and natural conversations in Hausa, recorded on mobile phones, laptops and studio microphones, in quiet and noisy settings. Every recording comes with a transcript and metadata about the speaker, the device and the setting, in WAV, OGG or another common format.
Is it Nigerian or Nigerien Hausa?
The speaker mix is listed on the spec sheet. Ask where the speakers in the hours you'd license come from, and the sample clips let you hear them before you commit.
Did every speaker consent to AI training?
Yes. Every speaker gave consent for their recordings to be used for commercial AI training.
How is the Hausa dataset licensed?
Licence terms are agreed with each customer, in writing, before delivery. That includes how you can use the data and whether anyone else can license the same recordings.
How much does the Hausa speech dataset cost?
We quote each order on its own, based on the hours you need and the licence terms. Send your request and your named contact comes back with a quote.
Can we hear Hausa samples first?
Yes. Ask and we send Hausa sample clips with the spec sheet, so you can check the audio before you commit.
What if we need more than 500 hours, or a specific accent?
We collect it. Hausa speakers from our network record new speech to your brief, such as a region, an age group, a device or a domain, and it can sit alongside the hours you license from stock.
Is this the same as a Hausa voice dataset or speech corpus?
For most uses, yes. Speech dataset, voice dataset, audio dataset and speech corpus are names for the same thing: recorded Hausa speech with details about each recording. If you need studio-quality voice for text-to-speech, ask for the recordings made in a studio.
Can we use it as a Hausa speech-to-text (ASR) dataset?
Yes. Every recording comes with a transcript, so it's ready for training and testing Hausa speech-to-text models. The spec sheet shows the transcript style, so you can check it matches your pipeline before you license it.
Why not use a free Hausa speech dataset?
Public Hausa corpora are a good start for research. Each one has its own licence and terms of use, and they cover what their creators chose to record, such as read sentences or broadcast speech. Read the licence before you train a commercial model on one, and check that it sounds like your users.
What does OTS mean?
OTS stands for off-the-shelf: data that's already recorded and ready to license, instead of collected after you order. Our OTS Hausa speech dataset is roughly 500 hours.
How many hours of Hausa speech do we need?
It depends on your starting model. A test set can be a few hours, fine-tuning a multilingual model often starts at tens to a few hundred hours, and training from scratch takes thousands. Your own tests should decide.
Can we fine-tune Whisper or wav2vec 2.0 on it?
Yes. Teams commonly fine-tune open speech models like these on licensed Hausa speech, and every recording comes with a transcript in WAV, OGG or another common format. The spec sheet shows the transcript style, so you can plan any conversion before you train.
Do you work with US teams?
Yes. We take calls in US Eastern mornings, which is evening in India. We're ISO 27001 certified, our SOC 2 report is available under NDA, and we sign GDPR data processing agreements and HIPAA business associate agreements on request.
Get Hausa sample clips
Say roughly how many Hausa hours you need and what the model is for. We'll send sample clips and the spec sheet.
- Your named contact replies within one business day.
- We send Hausa sample clips and the spec sheet.
- We agree the licence terms and send a quote.
This opens your email app with the request filled in. Nothing is sent until you press send. You can also use the contact page.