Loading
Low-resource
80m
speakers, low confidence estimate
35
AI readiness, weighted toward speech
4
dialects tracked as separate collection targets
The lingua franca of urban informal commerce from Lagos to Accra to Douala, supported by no major vendor at all, with no tonal orthography problem. The single best first language for a West African voice product.The most contested figure here. The commonly cited ~80m comes from a compilation rather than a census. Treat it as an order-of-magnitude claim; commercially it does not matter whether it is 40m or 100m.
Capability coverage
Some open data and big-tech ASR, but no production TTS. Demand exists; quality does not.
The facts
Dialects
Dialect is self-declared at contribution and then validated against gold-standard clips. Which dialects people turn up to record in is a better demand signal than any desk ranking.
Open corpora that cover it
Voices · 2
Take an API key and make the call from your own code, or start in the playground and see what the model actually does with your text.