BU-TTS: An Open-Source, Bilingual Welsh-English, Text-to-Speech Corpus
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review
Standard Standard
Proceedings of the CLTW 4 @ LREC2022. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2022. p. 104-109.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review
HarvardHarvard
APA
CBE
MLA
VancouverVancouver
Author
RIS
TY - GEN
T1 - BU-TTS: An Open-Source, Bilingual Welsh-English, Text-to-Speech Corpus
AU - Russell, Stephen
AU - Jones, Dewi
AU - Prys, Delyth
PY - 2022/7/25
Y1 - 2022/7/25
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - text-to-speech
KW - TTS
KW - speech synthesis
KW - English
KW - Welsh
KW - bilingual
KW - open source
KW - speech corpus
M3 - Conference contribution
SP - 104
EP - 109
BT - Proceedings of the CLTW 4 @ LREC2022
PB - European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
ER -