Whisper Small — Swahili (AfriVoice 5 Domains + Common Voice)

Stage 1 standard speech fine-tune of openai/whisper-small on AfriVoice Swahili (all 5 domains) interleaved with Common Voice Swahili. This model is trained on standard speech and serves as the base checkpoint for Stage 2 nonstandard speech fine-tuning (ElizabethMwangi/whisper-small-swahili-nss-afrivoice-cv).

Training Details

• Dataset: AfriVoice Swahili all 5 domains (389,599 utterances) interleaved with Common Voice Swahili (4,548 utterances)
• Language token: sw
• Full model training: encoder, decoder, and projection updated
• SpecAugment: On
• Learning rate: 1e-5 (polynomial decay, warmup 100 steps)
• Max steps: 1000
• Best checkpoint: step 650 (lowest eval WER 0.481)
• Output dir: sw_afrivoice_tune_whisper_small_v0.2

Results on AfriVoice Swahili (Standard Speech)

Results on Kenyan Swahili Nonstandard Speech (unadapted, test set)

These results show performance on nonstandard speech before Stage 2 fine-tuning.