Lagos-concentrated, so co-located with the buyers. Absent from ElevenLabs TTS, AWS Transcribe and Google Chirp 3; ElevenLabs' own published STT band for it is 25–50% WER.
- yor
- Tonal
- 7 dialects
49 AI readiness
46m
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Low-resource
28m
speakers, high confidence estimate
49
AI readiness, weighted toward speech
2
dialects tracked as separate collection targets
The largest free corpus covering it carries a CC BY 4.0 headline and still prohibits text-to-speech and voice cloning — which supports an ASR entry and not a TTS one.
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
Same family
Related
A Yoruba model helps Igbo less than the shared border suggests, and a Hausa model transfers usefully across Chadic languages in three other countries. These share Niger–Congo with Zulu.
Lagos-concentrated, so co-located with the buyers. Absent from ElevenLabs TTS, AWS Transcribe and Google Chirp 3; ElevenLabs' own published STT band for it is 25–50% WER.
49 AI readiness
46m
Commercially dense in trade and diaspora remittances. Absent from AWS Transcribe entirely and capped at Chirp 2 on Google.
49 AI readiness
33m
The highest-value regional asset after Hausa: cross-border into Niger, Cameroon and Chad, with strong humanitarian and agricultural demand.
18 AI readiness
20m±
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