CoVoST 2
Common Voice-based speech-translation corpus — 21 X→en + 15 en→X language pairs.
Drop your audio. Transcript in seconds. First transcript free, then $4 = 300 min
Upstream is archived. CoVoST 2’s repository has been set read-only by its owner, so there are no further releases, fixes, or security patches. The last commit landed 2021-09-14. It can still be cloned and run, and forks may be maintained elsewhere. See the repository.
Best for many-to-one and one-to-many speech translation benchmarks at scale (2880h total). Pricing: free.
What it is
CoVoST 2 extends Common Voice with translation targets — 21 source languages → English (2880h) plus English → 15 targets. The standard low-resource speech-translation benchmark. License: CC0.
Watch out for: CC0 1.0 (audio from Common Voice) · translation quality varies per pair · low-resource target pairs are <100h. Cite: Wang et al., LREC 2020.
Install / use
from datasets import load_dataset; ds = load_dataset('facebook/covost2', 'en_de')Features
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | No |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 22 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Links
CoVoST 2 vs Whipscribe
| Feature | CoVoST 2 | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | $4–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · 60 min free on signup |
| Speaker diarization | No | Yes |
| Word timestamps | No | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 22 | 99 |
| Platforms | HuggingFace, GitHub | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to CoVoST 2
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