COVID-19 Radio ASR: Analyzing community voices from radio broadcasts for public health planning, response and policy

Building a usable radio monitoring automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is a challenging task for under-resourced languages and yet this is paramount in societies where radio is the main medium of public communication and discussions. The main challenge is the absence of transcribed radio speech datasets. In this paper, we create a Luganda radio dataset and build a COVID-19 ASR. We use the ASR to analyse public radio discussions for public health response. We openly release a radio speech corpus of 155 hours. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available radio dataset in sub-Saharan Africa.