Radio-Browsing For Developmental Monitoring In Uganda

We consider the extraction of information from broadcast radio speech in Uganda for the purposes of informing relief and development programmes by the United Nations. Although internet penetration in Uganda is low, mobile phones are ubiquitous and have made radio a vibrant medium for interactive public discussion. Vulnerable groups make use of radio to discuss issues related to, for example, agriculture, health, governance and gender by means of phone-in or text-in talk shows. We have compiled corpora and developed a radio-browsing system for Ugandan English and for two indigenous languages, Luganda and Acholi. The systems employ automatic speech recognisers using HMM/GMM, SGMM and DNN/HMM acoustic models as keyword spotters. We present the first results indicating promising performance of the radio-browsing system.