We present speech corpora for Javanese, Sundanese, Sinhala, Nepali, and Bangladeshi Bengali. Each corpus consists of an average of approximately 200k recorded utterances that were provided by native-speaker volunteers in the respective region. Recordings were made using portable consumer electronics in reasonably quiet environments. For each recorded utterance the textual prompt and an anonymized hexadecimal identifier of the speaker are available. Biographical information of the speakers is unavailable. In particular, the speakers come from an unspecified mix of genders. The recordings are suitable for research on acoustic modeling for speech recognition, for example. To validate the integrity of the corpora and their suitability for speech recognition research, we provide simple recipes that illustrate how they can be used with the open-source Kaldi speech recognition toolkit. The corpora are being made available under a Creative Commons license in the hope that they will stimulate further research on these languages.
This paper describes the development of text-to-speech corpora for four South African languages. The approach followed investigated the possibility of using low-cost methods including informal recording environments and untrained volunteer speakers. This objective and the additional future goal of expanding the corpus to increase coverage of South Africa's 11 official languages necessitated experimenting with multi-speaker and code-switched data. The process and relevant observations are detailed throughout. The latest version of the corpora are available for download under an open-source licence and will likely see further development and refinement in future.
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