How can i SPEECH ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
This paper is a report on the content and status of a major speech database collection effort at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Western Australia. The goal is to collect a useful set of speech material from a very large number of speakers. These speakers are drawn from a wide cross-section of the local community with a variety of ethnic and education backgrounds. Speech materials include isolated digits and numbers, vowels and voiced phonemes, connected digits, and phonetically balanced sentences. Speech signals are encoded into 16-bit PCM format and stored onto Betamax format video tapes. In the seven months since this project started, speech from 100 speakers have been collected. A statistical break-down of the backgrounds of the speakers is also presented. How can i SPEECH ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Successful research and development of practical speech recognition algorithms and systems depends very much on the quantity and quality of speech data available. A number of large speech databases have been constructed or are under construction in the United States , France, the United Kingdom and Japan.
They are being used mainly for the evaluation and testing of speech recognition algorithms and systems. Some of them have been made available to the speech research community.
Our main research interest is in developing techniques and systems for speaker-independent speech recognition that are practical for use in Australia. This means that the database must contain speech taken from a very large number of speakers. It also means that what is generally considered as the Australian accent must be captured. The ethnic heterogeneity of Australians is well known and must also be taken into account if the systems are to be useful locally for the general public. Unfortunately, these constraints make the above-mentioned databases unsuitable for our purposes.