BU-TTS: An Open-Source, Bilingual Welsh-English, Text-to-Speech Corpus
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review
Electronic versions
Links
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/workshops/CLTW4/pdf/2022.cltw4-1.15.pdf
Final published version
Licence: CC BY-NC Show licence
This paper presents the design, collection and verification of a bilingual text-to-speech synthesis corpus for Welsh and English. The ever expanding voice collection currently contains almost 10 hours of recordings from a bilingual, phonetically balanced text corpus. The speakers consist of a professional voice actor and three amateur contributors, with male and female accents from north and south Wales. This corpus provides audio-text pairs for building and training high-quality bilingual Welsh-English neural based TTS systems. We describe the process by which we created a phonetically balanced prompt set and the challenges of attempting to collate such a dataset during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our initial findings in validating the corpus via the implementation of a state-of-the-art TTS models are presented. This corpus represents the first open-source Welsh language corpus large enough to capitalise on neural TTS architectures.
Keywords
- text-to-speech, TTS, speech synthesis, English, Welsh, bilingual, open source, speech corpus
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the CLTW 4 @ LREC2022 |
Publisher | European Language Resources Association (ELRA) |
Pages | 104-109 |
Publication status | Published - 25 Jul 2022 |