Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS)

by Meta AI / Facebook AI Research

44.5k hours of read multilingual audiobook speech across 8 European languages.

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TL;DR

Best for multilingual ASR training; cross-language transfer baselines beyond English. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
HuggingFace, OpenSLR

What it is

Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) extends LibriSpeech to 8 European languages from LibriVox: 44.5k hours total. English dominates (44.7k); other languages range 100–2000h. License: CC BY 4.0.

Best for: Multilingual ASR training; cross-language transfer baselines beyond English.
Watch out for: CC BY 4.0 · read audiobook (LibriVox) bias · 8 languages only (en, de, nl, fr, es, it, pt, pl) · public-domain books only. Cite: Pratap et al., Interspeech 2020.

Install / use

from datasets import load_dataset; ds = load_dataset('facebook/multilingual_librispeech', 'german')

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsNo
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supported8
HIPAA eligibleNo

Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) vs Whipscribe

FeatureMultilingual LibriSpeech (MLS)Whipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfree$4–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · 60 min free on signup
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsNoYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages899
PlatformsHuggingFace, OpenSLRWeb, API, MCP

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