Recent advances in speech synthesis have enabled many useful applications like audio directions in Google Maps, screen readers, and automated content generation on platforms like TikTok. However, these systems are mostly dominated by voices sourced from data-rich geographies with personas representative of their source data. Although 3000 of the world's languages are domiciled in Africa, African voices and personas are under-represented in these systems. As speech synthesis becomes increasingly democratized, it is desirable to increase the representation of African English accents. We present Afro-TTS, the first pan-African accented English speech synthesis system able to generate speech in 86 African accents, with 1000 personas representing the rich phonological diversity across the continent for downstream application in Education, Public Health, and Automated Content Creation. Speaker interpolation retains naturalness and accentedness, enabling the creation of new voices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was once the stuff of science fiction. It is used in mobile phone technology and motor vehicles. But concerns have emerged about the accountability of AI and related technologies like machine learning. In December 2020 a computer scientist, Timnit Gebru, was fired from Google's Ethical AI team. She had previously raised the alarm about the social effects of bias in AI technologies.