Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one of the most important technologies to support spoken communication in modern life. However, its development benefits from large speech corpus. The development of such a corpus is expensive and most of the human languages, including the Ethiopian languages, do not have such resources. To address this problem, we have developed four large (about 22 hours) speech corpora for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta. To assess usability of the corpora for (the purpose of) speech processing, we have developed ASR systems for each language. In this paper, we present the corpora and the baseline ASR systems we have developed. We have achieved word error rates (WERs) of 37.65%, 31.03%, 38.02%, 33.89% for Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta, respectively. This results show that the corpora are suitable for further investigation towards the development of ASR systems. Thus, the research community can use the corpora to further improve speech processing systems. From our results, it is clear that the collection of text corpora to train strong language models for all of the languages is still required, especially for Oromo and Wolaytta.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one of the most important technologies to help people live a better life in the 21st century. However, its development requires a big speech corpus for a language. The development of such a corpus is expensive especially for under-resourced Ethiopian languages. To address this problem we have developed four medium-sized (longer than 22 hours each) speech corpora for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo, and Wolaytta. In a way of checking the usability of the corpora and deliver a baseline ASR for each language. In this paper, we present the corpora and the baseline ASR systems for each language. The word error rates (WERs) we achieved show that the corpora are usable for further investigation and we recommend the collection of text corpora to train strong language models for Oromo and Wolaytta compared to others.