Question 1

What is Wa-Zo-Bia?

Accepted Answer

A registry for Nigerian speech recordings. It tracks speakers, sessions and clips, records consent, and runs a human verification pass before any clip can be used. The name comes from Wá (Yorùbá), Zo (Hausa) and Bia (Igbo), the word come in three languages.

Question 2

How is a recording verified?

Accepted Answer

A named person listens to the clip beside its transcript and marks it verified or rejects it with a reason (audio quality, transcript mismatch, tone error, clipping, wrong speaker, too short, too long). Nothing is auto-approved. Rejected clips are never deleted, only excluded.

Question 3

Why do tone marks matter so much?

Accepted Answer

Yorùbá tone marks carry lexical meaning, so stripping them silently corrupts the data. Text is stored as UTF-8 and never normalised, and any transcript with Yorùbá vowels but no tone marks at all is flagged as a likely loss in transit.

Question 4

What does the export contain?

Accepted Answer

An LJSpeech style dataset: a wavs directory plus a pipe delimited metadata.csv of clip id and transcript. Only clips marked verified, whose speaker granted consent that has not expired, are included. Every export writes a log row naming the clips, the filter criteria and the timestamp.

Question 5

What does -- mean on a page?

Accepted Answer

Absence. A double hyphen means the value is unknown or not recorded. It never means zero, and no fallback label is substituted for missing data.

Question 6

How do speakers give consent?

Accepted Answer

Through an invitation link. The speaker fills in their identity and language details, reads the terms, then signs a PDF in the browser with a timestamped electronic signature. Nothing is signed on their behalf.

Question 7

Can a speaker withdraw?

Accepted Answer

Yes, at any time, by contacting the team. Consent status moves to withdrawn, the speaker is flagged everywhere they appear, and their clips drop out of every future export.

Question 8

Can a cloned voice be used in a film or with an avatar?

Accepted Answer

Only where the speaker signed the separate media and film use consent on top of corpus consent, and that consent has not expired. The lab checks both before it will generate. Audio can be taken into an edit or paired with an avatar on another platform, within the scope the speaker agreed to.

Question 9

What record exists of a generation?

Accepted Answer

Every generation writes a provenance record naming the speaker, the consent scope and date, the language, the text and the time. Downloads can carry that record as a sidecar file.

Question 10

Do I need an account?

Accepted Answer

To buy a plan or keep your history, yes. To try the lab on a one off access pass, no. Speakers never need an account, they use an invitation link.

Question 11

What is an access pass?

Accepted Answer

A single code that opens the lab for 24 hours on one device, with a fixed credit allowance. It suits a one day job. Regular work is cheaper on a plan.

Question 12

Where is my data held?

Accepted Answer

Recordings, transcripts, consent documents and account records are held in the project database and file storage. See the privacy notice and the security page for what is stored and who can reach it.

Question 13

How much does each plan cost and what is included?

Accepted Answer

Free $0 (10,000 credits), Starter $9 (30,000 credits), Creator $29 (121,000 credits and 1 voice clone), Pro $99 (600,000 credits and 3 voice clones). Credits are shared across narration, cloning and transcription.

Question 14

How do credits work?

Accepted Answer

One credit is one character of narration. Transcription costs 330 credits a minute of audio. Creating a voice clone costs 40,000 credits. Every plan draws on the same pool, so spending on one leaves less for the others.

Question 15

When do credits reset, and do unused credits roll over?

Accepted Answer

Your allowance resets at the start of each billing cycle, which begins on the day you subscribe. Unused credits do not roll over, and the balance is topped back up to the plan amount on renewal.

Question 16

Do you still sell one-off access passes?

Accepted Answer

Yes. An access pass is a single code that opens Ohùn Lab for 24 hours on one device with a fixed quota. Passes suit a one-day session; plans suit anyone working month to month.

Question 17

What are the consent rules for a cloned voice?

Accepted Answer

A voice can only be cloned when the speaker has granted corpus consent and a separate, signed media and film use consent that has not expired. Ohùn Lab refuses the generation otherwise, and records the consent state on every file it produces.

Question 18

Can I use the audio in a film?

Accepted Answer

Yes, on a paid plan, and only for speakers whose media and film use consent covers that production. Each download carries a provenance sidecar naming the speaker, the consent scope and the date, which is what a production lawyer will ask for.

Question 19

Do you offer yearly billing?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Yearly billing works out to two months free: you pay for ten months. That is $90 for Starter, $290 for Creator and $990 for Pro.

Question 20

What happens if I cancel?

Accepted Answer

Your plan stays active until the end of the current billing cycle, after which it does not renew and the credit pool closes. Nothing you have already generated is withdrawn, and the provenance records stay in the registry.