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Igbo (ig) · Lagos, recording to order

Igbo speech data, across dialects, recorded to your spec.

Read prompts and natural conversation in Igbo from ID-checked, consenting speakers, transcribed in standard orthography with dialect and region recorded for every clip.

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Free 10-hour sample first. A person replies within one working day.

A Nigerian woman speaking into her phone at home

Where it is spoken

Igbo at a glance.

Spoken mainly in south-east Nigeria (Anambra, Enugu, Imo, Abia, Ebonyi) and parts of Delta and Rivers, with a large population in Lagos and abroad.

Code: ig (ISO 639-1)
Script: Latin alphabet (Ọnwụ orthography) with dotted vowels ị, ọ, ụ and the letter ṅ
Tone marks: Igbo is tonal; tone marks are added on request (most everyday writing omits them)
Dialects: Standard Igbo by default; dialect areas such as Owerri, Onitsha, Enugu and Afikpo tagged when you need them

Why it is hard for models

What speech models get wrong.

Many dialects

Igbo dialects differ a lot in sound and vocabulary; a model trained on one can struggle with another.

Tone and dotted vowels

Dotted vowels and tone carry meaning, and online text often drops both.

Igbo–English mixing

Many speakers switch into English, especially in cities; transcripts must keep it.

ASR and TTS

Read prompts or conversation? Usually both.

For speech recognition (ASR)

For ASR we record a broad mix of speakers and dialects on read prompts and conversation, transcribed in standard orthography with dialect tags.

For text-to-speech (TTS)

For TTS we record a small number of speakers for longer from a balanced prompt list in quiet rooms, with voice-synthesis consent named explicitly.

Speaker diversity

A fair mix of real speakers.

Speakers recruited by dialect area, age band and gender
Lagos-based Igbo speakers first; south-east cities as we expand
Every speaker ID-checked so one voice is one person
Trading, family, church, transport and service topics

Recording spec

How each clip is recorded and delivered.

Audio: WAV 48 kHz, 16-bit, mono per speaker (one track each in two-person sessions)
Tasks: Read prompts (your list or ours), natural two-person conversation, scripted service dialogues
Transcripts: UTF-8, one per clip, speaker turns and non-speech events marked; second-pass checks on every batch
Metadata: Language, age band, gender, region, device, consent ID and consent version per clip
Consent: Recorded in the speaker’s own language; voice synthesis (TTS) named explicitly when it applies
Delivery: Weekly batches over signed links, with a manifest and a QA report

Open data first

Honest advice: what to try before buying.

NaijaVoices (open, non-commercial)

NaijaVoices is an open speech dataset of Igbo, Hausa and Yorùbá released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which does not allow commercial use. Good for research and benchmarks; licensed data is for products.

Source: NaijaVoices dataset card, Hugging Face

Open sets exist; check their licences

Igbo appears in open collections such as Mozilla Common Voice and academic corpora. Start there if they fit; we supply licensed, consented data to your spec.

Source: Mozilla Common Voice

Questions

Buyers usually ask.

Which Igbo dialects can you cover?

Standard Igbo by default. We tag dialect area for every speaker and can recruit to a dialect quota. Lagos has speakers from across the south-east; dedicated south-east collection is on our expansion list.

Are speakers recorded in Igboland or in Lagos?

Today in Lagos, which has a large Igbo-speaking population. We record each speaker’s home region in the metadata.

How do I order Igbo speech data?

Email [email protected] or use the request form with the hours, read/conversation split, speaker mix and transcript rules you need. We record a free sample of about 10 hours to your spec first. Pricing is quoted per approved hour after scoping.

How do speakers consent?

Each speaker passes an ID check and records consent in their own language before any paid task. If the data will be used for voice synthesis (TTS), that use is named explicitly. Speakers can withdraw from future deliveries.

Keep exploring

Tell us what you need. We send a free sample first.

Email [email protected] with the data type, hours, languages or trades, labels and format. Pricing is quoted per approved hour after scoping.

Email us Request form