WAXAL: A Large-Scale Multilingual African Language Speech Corpus

The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset for 21 languages representing over 100 million speakers. The collection consists of two main components: an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset containing approximately 1,250 hours of transcribed, natural speech from a diverse range of speakers, and a Text-to-Speech (TTS) dataset with over 180 hours of high-quality, single-speaker recordings reading phonetically balanced scripts. This paper details our methodology for data collection, annotation, and quality control, which involved partnerships with four African academic and community organizations. We provide a detailed statistical overview of the dataset and discuss its potential limitations and ethical considerations. The WAXAL datasets are released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/WaxalNLP under the permissive CC-BY-4.0 license to catalyze research, enable the development of inclusive technologies, and serve as a vital resource for the digital preservation of these languages.

Oya: Deep Learning for Accurate Global Precipitation Estimation

Accurate precipitation estimation is critical for hydrological applications, especially in the Global South where ground-based observation networks are sparse and forecasting skill is limited. Existing satellite-based precipitation products often rely on the longwave infrared channel alone or are calibrated with data that can introduce significant errors, particularly at sub-daily timescales. This study introduces Oya, a novel real-time precipitation retrieval algorithm utilizing the full spectrum of visible and infrared (VIS-IR) observations from geostationary (GEO) satellites. Oya employs a two-stage deep learning approach, combining two U-Net models: one for precipitation detection and another for quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE), to address the inherent data imbalance between rain and no-rain events. The models are trained using high-resolution GPM Combined Radar-Radiometer Algorithm (CORRA) v07 data as ground truth and pre-trained on IMERG-Final retrievals to enhance robustness and mitigate overfitting due to the limited temporal sampling of CORRA. By leveraging multiple GEO satellites, Oya achieves quasi-global coverage and demonstrates superior performance compared to existing competitive regional and global precipitation baselines, offering a promising pathway to improved precipitation monitoring and forecasting.

AI Increases Global Access to Reliable Flood Forecasts

Floods are one of the most common and impactful natural disasters, with a disproportionate impact in developing countries that often lack dense streamflow monitoring networks. Accurate and timely warnings are critical for mitigating flood risks, but accurate hydrological simulation models typically must be calibrated to long data records in each watershed where they are applied. We developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to predict extreme hydrological events at timescales up to 7 days in advance. This model significantly outperforms current state of the art global hydrology models (the Copernicus Emergency Management Service Global Flood Awareness System) across all continents, lead times, and return periods. AI is especially effective at forecasting in ungauged basins, which is important because only a few percent of the world's watersheds have stream gauges, with a disproportionate number of ungauged basins in developing countries that are especially vulnerable to the human impacts of flooding. We produce forecasts of extreme events in South America and Africa that achieve reliability approaching the current state of the art in Europe and North America, and we achieve reliability at between 4 and 6-day lead times that are similar to current state of the art nowcasts (0-day lead time). Additionally, we achieve accuracies over 10-year return period events that are similar to current accuracies over 2-year return period events, meaning that AI can provide warnings earlier and over larger and more impactful events. The model that we develop in this paper has been incorporated into an operational early warning system that produces publicly available (free and open) forecasts in real time in over 80 countries. This work using AI and open data highlights a need for increasing the availability of hydrological data to continue to improve global access to reliable flood warnings.