vikkyblacq/kare-codeswitch-samples

Kare — Code-Switching Illustrative Samples

Eight short audio clips demonstrating the English/Yoruba/Hausa/Igbo/Pidgin code-switching that Kare, a voice-first AI health assistant for Nigeria, is built to understand — submitted as part of Kare's entry to the Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge.

What this is — and isn't

• Is: eight original sentences, written by the Kare team specifically for this demonstration, mixing everyday Yoruba / Hausa / Igbo / Nigerian Pidgin with embedded English clinical terms — the exact phenomenon Kare's ASR benchmark exists to measure. Audio was synthesized with Sahara (Intron) TTS, the speech API this challenge provides.

• Isn't the benchmark corpus itself. Kare's actual benchmark evaluates five ASR models against Intron's own AfriSwitchCare and AfriSwitch datasets — real, professionally-produced datasets gated on Hugging Face (contact-approval and manual-approval respectively). Those aren't ours to redistribute; this repo links to the source instead:

  • https://huggingface.co/datasets/intronhealth/AfriSwitchCare
  • https://huggingface.co/datasets/intronhealth/AfriSwitch

  This dataset is a small, original, fully-owned set built to give reviewers something to actually listen to without going through that gate. No human speaker's voice or identity is involved — every clip is machine-synthesized from text we wrote — so there is no consent or de-identification question to begin with.

Contents

8 clips, ~35 seconds total, 2 per language (Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin), each pairing everyday matrix-language grammar with embedded English clinical vocabulary (symptom names, drug names). See metadata.csv for the full table (file_name, language_code, language, duration_s, text, english_gloss, voice).

Clip	Language	Duration	Text
yoruba-01	Yoruba	3.48s	Doctor, ara mi gbóná, and mo ní headache láti àárọ̀.
yoruba-02	Yoruba	3.05s	Mo ti mu paracetamol, but the fever ò tíì lọ.
hausa-01	Hausa	4.79s	Likita, ina jin zafi a ciki na, and I've been vomiting since last night.
hausa-02	Hausa	3.44s	Na sha the malaria drugs, but zazzabi bai tafi ba.
igbo-01	Igbo	4.57s	Dọkịta, ahụ na-esi m ike kemgbe ụtụtụ, and my whole body feels weak.
igbo-02	Igbo	2.74s	Ejila m ọgwụ ahụ, but the swelling ka nọ.
pidgin-01	Nigerian Pidgin	7.14s	Doctor, the malaria don come back. My body dey hot since morning, and the sharp pain for my side never stop.
pidgin-02	Nigerian Pidgin	5.40s	I don dey take the tablet wey you give me, but the swelling never really go down.

English glosses for all eight are in metadata.csv.

A note on accuracy

The Pidgin and Yoruba lines were written and checked by the team directly; Hausa and Igbo constructions were written in-house for this demo and are common, everyday phrasing, but have not been reviewed by a native or professional linguist. If something reads oddly to a fluent speaker, treat it as a demo-quality artifact, not a claim of linguistic authority.

Provenance & reuse

• Text: original, written by the Kare team for this submission — free to reuse or adapt.
• Audio: synthesized via Sahara (Intron) TTS under Kare's access to that API for the Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge; shared here for challenge review. If you want to reuse the audio itself outside that context, check with Intron on Sahara TTS output terms first.
• Loading: standard Hugging Face audiofolder layout — load_dataset("vikkyblacq/kare-codeswitch-samples") picks up metadata.csv automatically.

Built for the Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge. Kare's full benchmark, code and submission materials: https://github.com/Vikky-Ajayi/Kare