Apply to become a certified provider
GlobalPhone Swahili
The GlobalPhone corpus developed in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 22 spoken languages: Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Hausa (ELRA-S0347), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swahili (ELRA-S0375), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Ukrainian (ELRA-S0377), and Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322). In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary. The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news. The speech is available in 16bit, 16kHz mono quality, recorded with a close-speaking microphone (Sennheiser 440-6). The transcriptions are internally validated and supplemented by special markers for spontaneous effects like stuttering, false starts, and non-verbal effects like laughing and hesitations. Speaker information like age, gender, occupation, etc. as well as information about the recording setup complement the database. The entire GlobalPhone corpus contains over 450 hours of speech spoken by more than 2100 native adult speakers. Data is shortened by means of the shorten program written by Tony Robinson, available from Softsound's web page: http://www.softsound.com/ linux distributions, or simulated versions such as cygwin. Alternatively, the data could be delivered unshorten. The GlobalPhone Swahili corpus contains 7,728 utterances spoken by 70 speakers. Native speakers of Swahili were asked to read prompted sentences of newspaper articles. The entire collection took place in Nairobi, Kenya. Swahili Newspaper source: http://www.voaswahili.com
ELRA