SilencioNetwork/global-french-speech

Global French Speech Dataset

Speaker-attributed spontaneous speech. 50 labelled contributors across 11 self-reported origin varieties, recorded on their own devices in their own environments. Every clip carries origin region / variety, mother tongue, gender, device, OS, recording environment.

Hours	0.54
Clips	50
Speakers	50
Origin varieties	11
Languages	1
Configs	2
Speaker metadata	origin region / variety, mother tongue, gender, device, OS, recording environment
Audio	48 kHz stereo WAV, as captured
Transcripts	ASR-generated, 92% coverage, not human-reviewed — human-validated transcription available on demand
Licence	cc-by-nc-4.0

Transcripts are ASR-generated and cover 92% of clips. They have not been human-reviewed.

Human-validated transcription is available on demand for this data. Word-level forced alignment included, as shipped in cebuano-speech and tagalog-filipino-speech. Available for this sample, for a larger subset of the same language, or for commissioned collection — info@silencio.network

What this is for

Transcripts here are unreviewed ASR output — usable as pseudo-labels for semi-supervised work, but not a human-validated ASR training set. What it does carry is speaker-level labels on real-world audio, which supports a range of work needing no transcripts at all:

• Accent and dialect classification. 11 self-reported origin varieties across 50 speakers, labelled per clip. No transcripts needed.
• Speaker identification and verification. 50 labelled speakers. Speaker-disjoint splits can be constructed directly from speaker_id.
• Age and gender estimation. Self-reported birth year and gender on every speaker.
• Robustness and fairness auditing. Device, operating system and recording environment are recorded per clip, so error rates can be broken down by capture condition as well as by speaker attribute.
• Self-supervised pretraining. Unlabelled real-world speech is the input these methods want; the absence of transcripts is not a limitation here.

If you need transcripts, they are available on demand over this data — see below.

Load it

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("SilencioNetwork/global-french-speech", "french_canada", split="train")
print(ds[0])

Requires pip install "datasets>=4.0" and FFmpeg ≥ 4.

Configs: french_canada, french_global

Speaker and recording metadata

Speaker origin / variety	Speakers	%
Canada (Québec) - Montréalais	14	28.0%
France - Lyonnais	10	20.0%
France - Normand	6	12.0%
France - Parisian	6	12.0%
Canada (Québec) - Quebec City	4	8.0%
France - Toulousain	3	6.0%
Canada (Québec) - Québécois rural	2	4.0%
Canada - Ontario	2	4.0%
France - Marseillais	1	2.0%
United States - Californian	1	2.0%
unknown	1	2.0%

Gender	Speakers	%
male	45	90.0%
female	3	6.0%
prefer_not_to_say	1	2.0%
non_binary	1	2.0%

Ethnicity (self-reported)	Speakers	%
White	37	74.0%
Black or African American	7	14.0%
Hispanic or Latino	2	4.0%
Mixed Race	2	4.0%
Native American	1	2.0%
Other	1	2.0%

Device	Clips	%
Mobile	41	82.0%
Desktop	9	18.0%

Environment	Clips	%
home	35	70.0%
outdoor	5	10.0%
office	5	10.0%
cafe	1	2.0%
public_transport	1	2.0%
gym	1	2.0%
restaurant	1	2.0%
other	1	2.0%

Ethnicity is self-reported by the contributor at enrolment, using a fixed category list; it is not inferred from the audio and it is not a label of the speech. It is included because accent and speaker-attribute fairness work needs it, and it is collected under the same consent as the rest of the metadata.

Human-validated transcription — available on demand

This release is not human-transcribed. Silencio provides human transcription with word-level forced alignment on demand, over this sample or over a larger subset of the same language, and as part of commissioned collection.

These releases show exactly what that deliverable looks like — human transcript text, machine forced alignment, per-token start and end times:

• SilencioNetwork/cebuano-speech — Cebuano (Bisaya) Spontaneous Speech
• SilencioNetwork/tagalog-filipino-speech — Tagalog / Filipino Spontaneous Speech

To request transcription over this data or any other Silencio subset: info@silencio.network

Limitations

• Sample scale. 50 clips, 50 speakers, 0.54 hours. This is a demonstration sample, not a training corpus.
• Partial, unreviewed transcripts. 92% coverage, ASR-generated.
• Gender imbalance. 45 of 50 speakers are male. Do not use this release for gender-comparative work. Balanced cohorts are available through the collection programme.
• No acoustic annotation. Recording environment, background-noise class and SNR are not annotated in this release. Available for commissioned collection.
• Audio is 48 kHz stereo WAV as captured. Resample and downmix before batching.
• No baseline. No reference WER is published with this release.

Provenance and consent

Every recording is contributed by an opted-in participant through the Silencio app, under a consent record covering AI/ML training use. Contributors can request deletion, and deletion propagates to downstream releases. Full provenance documentation is available to licensees.

License

cc-by-nc-4.0 — free for research and non-commercial use with attribution.

Attribution string: Silencio Network, Global French Speech Dataset, 2026. CC BY-NC 4.0.

Non-commercial covers research, evaluation and publication. Benchmarking a commercial product model against this data is a commercial use and needs a licence — ask, it is usually granted for evaluation. Model weights trained on this sample inherit the non-commercial restriction.

Commercial licensing: info@silencio.network

Citation

@misc{silencio_global_french_speech_2026,
  title  = {Global French Speech Dataset},
  author = {Silencio Network},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/SilencioNetwork/global-french-speech}
}

Silencio corpus and collection network

Two distinct figures, because they answer different questions.

Recorded and available off the shelf — audio already collected, with metadata, licensable today:

Hours recorded	127,793
Recordings	9,392,870
Contributors who recorded	222,145
Languages	156
Countries and territories of origin	216

Contributor network available for commissioned collection — registered, consented contributors who can be activated for a specific brief. These are not active contributors to the corpus above; they are the pool it is drawn from and extended through:

Registered contributors	2,000,000+
Countries	180+
Languages reachable	250+

For volume licensing, human transcription over an existing subset, or commissioned collection in a language not listed: info@silencio.network