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DONDO: Open w2v-BERT Speech-Recognition Base Models for African Languages

Research Multimodal & Generative

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Merged summary

TL;DR - DONDO is a family of openly licensed w2v-BERT 2.0 speech-recognition models covering 27 African language varieties. Its multilingual models achieve average word error rates of 10–13%, approaching monolingual performance while consolidating multiple languages into single checkpoints.

  • Includes 21 monolingual and five multilingual models across six African countries.
  • Uses learning-rate-annealed fine-tuning to recover or surpass strong monolingual baselines.
  • Supports inference-time language steering through lightweight one-hot language-prefix frames.
  • Released under Apache-2.0 on Hugging Face for unrestricted fine-tuning, including commercial use.

Sources (1)

DONDO: Open w2v-BERT Speech-Recognition Base Models for African Languages

arXiv cs.CL Paul Azunre 2026-07-23 arXiv:2607.21540
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 0
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 0 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-24 14:35:34.236444 UTC

TL;DR - DONDO is a family of openly licensed w2v-BERT 2.0 speech-recognition models covering 27 African language varieties. Its multilingual models achieve average word error rates of 10–13%, approaching monolingual performance while consolidating multiple languages into single checkpoints.

  • Includes 21 monolingual and five multilingual models across six African countries.
  • Uses learning-rate-annealed fine-tuning to recover or surpass strong monolingual baselines.
  • Supports inference-time language steering through lightweight one-hot language-prefix frames.
  • Released under Apache-2.0 on Hugging Face for unrestricted fine-tuning, including commercial use.
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