Miyobe Speech to Text: Preserving a Tonal Language with AI

Miyobe (also known as Soruba) is a Gur language spoken in the Atakora Department of Benin and parts of Togo. With an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 speakers, it is a minority language that holds deep cultural significance. The language is tonal, using high, mid, and low tones to distinguish meaning. For example, the word 'bá' (high tone) means 'father', while 'bà' (low tone) means 'to be sour'. This tonal complexity makes automatic speech recognition a challenge, but it is essential for accurate transcription.

Why Accurate Transcription Matters for Miyobe

Transcribing Miyobe speech into text allows communities to document their oral heritage. Folktales, historical narratives, and everyday conversations can be preserved in written form. For linguists, these transcripts are raw material for language documentation and analysis. For educators, they support literacy in Miyobe. For content creators, subtitles make videos accessible. Without reliable transcription, much of this knowledge remains locked in audio recordings that are hard to search, share, or study.

Transcription Challenges Specific to Miyobe

• Tonal distinctions: The three level tones and contour tones must be captured accurately. Speechyou's model uses tonal feature extraction to differentiate minimal pairs.
• Vowel length and nasalization: Short vs. long vowels (e.g., 'kɛ' vs. 'kɛɛ') and oral vs. nasal vowels (e.g., 'kɛ' vs. 'kɛ̃') are phonemic. The model is trained to recognize these differences.
• Limited digital resources: As a low-resource language, Miyobe has few publicly available speech corpora. Speechyou uses transfer learning and data augmentation to overcome data scarcity.
• Dialectal variation: The four main dialects (Boukombé, Tanguiéta, Cobly, Natitingou) differ in pronunciation and vocabulary. Speechyou's model is trained on multiple dialects to ensure broad coverage.

Use Cases for Miyobe Speech-to-Text

• Oral history preservation: Transcribe interviews with elders to create a searchable digital archive of cultural knowledge.
• Subtitle generation: Create SRT or VTT subtitles for community videos, making them accessible to deaf viewers and language learners.
• Language documentation: Convert field recordings into text for dictionary building, grammar writing, and linguistic analysis.
• Educational content: Produce transcripts of language lessons and stories for use in schools and literacy programs.
• Accessibility: Add captions to Miyobe-language media, improving access for people with hearing impairments.
• Translation pipeline: Transcribe Miyobe audio first, then translate the text into French or English for wider dissemination.

How Speechyou Helps

Speechyou is the only commercial speech-to-text service that supports Miyobe. Our AI model is fine-tuned on Miyobe speech data, capturing tonal contrasts, vowel length, and nasalization. You can upload audio or video files and receive accurate transcripts in the standard Latin-based orthography. The output can be exported as plain text, SRT, or VTT subtitles. Whether you are a linguist working on documentation, a community advocate preserving oral traditions, or a content creator adding subtitles, Speechyou provides the tools you need.

Getting Started

Transcribing Miyobe audio with Speechyou is straightforward. Simply upload your file, select 'Miyobe (Latin)' as the language, and start transcription. In minutes, you will have a time-aligned transcript ready for editing or export. The Solo plan includes unlimited transcription, making it affordable for individual researchers and small projects. Try Speechyou today and help preserve the Miyobe language for future generations.