Preserving Horn of Africa languages and cultural archives at scale, backed by validated Somali speech recognition and deep regional ties.
Phoenix Rising Group processes regional broadcast, oral history, and cultural archives to preserve Somali and other Horn of Africa languages for future generations. We operate at an early research stage: proof-of-concept validated on public data, with broadcast archive validation underway.
Persistent, low-cost cultural archive preservation from the Horn of Africa. Automated pipelines ingest, transcribe, and analyze regional media and oral history at scale.
Building a platform to process broadcast and cultural archives from a linguistically underserved region. Decades of regional media spanning news, interviews, and cultural programming.
Our fine-tuned ASR pipeline outperforms commercial systems. SASR Eval achieved 37.8% lower WER than ElevenLabs and 57.8% lower than Whisper large-v3.
Our fine-tuned ASR pipeline has been validated on Somali speech. SASR Eval achieved 37.8% lower WER than ElevenLabs and 57.8% lower than Whisper large-v3. We’re now applying this to the Horn of Africa’s broadcast ecosystem.
| Component | Specification | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Base model | Whisper small (244M parameters) | Deployed |
| Training | ~1 hour on single T4 GPU, 500 training steps | Complete |
| Evaluation | SASR Eval: 50 clips, ground-truth WER/CER | Complete (June 2026) |
| Next validation | SASR Eval broadcast validation: broadcast data from regional archives | August 2026 |
| Stage | Proof-of-concept validated on public dataset | Research stage |
We are building a platform to process and analyze decades of broadcast data from the Horn of Africa including news, interviews, cultural and educational programming in Somali and regional languages. This is the foundation for persistent cultural archive preservation at a fraction of traditional collection costs.
Platform designed for continuous ingestion of Horn of Africa media from Djibouti, Somaliland, and adjacent territories where language technology has limited reach.
Infrastructure to digitize, transcribe, and index historical broadcast recordings. Enables retrospective analysis alongside ongoing archival work.
Detailed data access terms, archive specifications, and collection methodology are shared with qualified academic and cultural partners under NDA. Contact us to request a briefing.
Commercial ASR systems underperform on Somali (WER 0.59–0.87 on public benchmarks). Our fine-tuned model at WER 0.368 demonstrates that domain-specific training closes this gap.
Phoenix Rising Group is a father-son team with deep cultural and political ties to Djibouti and Somaliland. This is not a remote research effort. It is built on relationships with regional broadcasters and language communities.
Native understanding of Horn of Africa culture, dialects, and media landscapes. Relationships with broadcast institutions in Djibouti and Somaliland.
Computer science background with hands-on ASR development. Built and validated SASR Eval end-to-end: dataset construction, model training, and benchmark scoring.
Actively engaging with universities, cultural institutions, and language preservation organizations. Seeking research and archival partners for cultural preservation at scale.
Full SASR Eval benchmark data, per-clip results, and methodology.
SASR Eval Results