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African UltraChat

open / Overall score: 1.7

African UltraChat is a multi-turn chat dataset of about 55,000 conversations in 11 African languages, among them Amharic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Swahili, Yoruba and isiZulu, with a small test split. Each record holds a user prompt and the exchange of user and assistant messages, tagged by language. Masakhane publishes it.

The card carries only a license and a language list, so how the conversations were produced is not documented.

Openness

4 medium confidence

4.0

license: mit(card metadata only)
access: public(Hugging Face repository is not gated)
dataset_card: partial(metadata only (license, languages)

It downloads without a gate under the MIT license given in the card metadata. The card says nothing about where the conversations came from, so any terms inherited from a source dataset are unknown.

https://huggingface.co/api/datasets/masakhane/african-ultrachat recorded 2026-09-24
"gated": false; languages am, ha, ig, rw, st, sn, so, sw, xh, yo, zu.
https://huggingface.co/datasets/masakhane/african-ultrachat/raw/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-24
Card is front matter only: "license: mit" and a language list, with no body text.

Adoption

1 high confidence

1.0

Hugging Face downloads of the single repository. Downloads count file fetches and cannot show how many chat models were tuned on it.

https://huggingface.co/api/datasets/masakhane/african-ultrachat recorded 2026-09-24
151 downloads in the trailing 30 days for masakhane/african-ultrachat

Capability

2 medium confidence

2.0

African UltraChat offers chat-format conversations in 11 African languages, but its card documents neither sources nor method, so it is unclear whether the text was translated, generated or written. It sits well below Inkuba-Instruct, which names every dataset it was built from and has a named model tuned on it.

https://huggingface.co/datasets/masakhane/african-ultrachat recorded 2026-09-24
Viewer: "default · 55k rows", train 53.9k, test 1.1k; fields prompt, prompt_id, messages, language (11 values).

Verified 2026-09-24