Using automatic speech recognition to transcribe voice messages from African farmers

How do you gather qualitative information from thousands of people, quickly and at scale?

That’s a question Farm Radio International, a communication for development organization that uses interactive radio as its primary tool to reach and amplify the voices of rural Africans, has an answer to: On Air Dialogues.

This on-air polling process uses Interactive Voice Response technology in tandem with Farm Radio’s Uliza Interactive suite of services. Radio programs spark discussion about topics, then listeners call Uliza Interactive to leave their responses – both qualitative and quantitative – to questions.

Though successful – during a 2022 On Air Dialogue about climate change, 14,356 respondents left 9,317 audio comments – there is one ongoing challenge: the volume of responses means that our team of staff and volunteers does not have the capacity to manually transcribe all responses.

To complicate matters, answers may be recorded in a variety of local languages and dialects, which means that the transcriber must be fluent in both the language of recording and the language of transcription (English or French). This means that making full use of this rich data set is resource-intensive, and listeners’ contributions, in all their variety, are not all being considered and acted upon.

In 2022, we partnered with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a research centre of CGIAR, to test the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe voice recordings from listeners. ASR is a computer’s use of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) to process human speech in a written format.

Read more: Using automatic speech recognition to transcribe voice messages from African farmers at the Communication Initiative Network

Author: Farm Radio International

Photo: Adasa John in Tanzania // Frederic Courbet for Farm Radio International