Open-source Multi-speaker Speech Corpora for Building Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu Speech Synthesis Systems

Fei He, Shan-Hui Cathy Chu, Oddur Kjartansson, Clara Rivera, Anna Katanova, Alexander Gutkin, Isin Demirsahin, Cibu Johny, Martin Jansche, Supheakmungkol Sarin, Knot Pipatsrisawat


Abstract
We present free high quality multi-speaker speech corpora for Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, which are six of the twenty two official languages of India spoken by 374 million native speakers. The datasets are primarily intended for use in text-to-speech (TTS) applications, such as constructing multilingual voices or being used for speaker or language adaptation. Most of the corpora (apart from Marathi, which is a female-only database) consist of at least 2,000 recorded lines from female and male native speakers of the language. We present the methodological details behind corpora acquisition, which can be scaled to acquiring data for other languages of interest. We describe the experiments in building a multilingual text-to-speech model that is constructed by combining our corpora. Our results indicate that using these corpora results in good quality voices, with Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) > 3.6, for all the languages tested. We believe that these resources, released with an open-source license, and the described methodology will help in the progress of speech applications for the languages described and aid corpora development for other, smaller, languages of India and beyond.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.800
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6494–6503
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.800
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fei He, Shan-Hui Cathy Chu, Oddur Kjartansson, Clara Rivera, Anna Katanova, Alexander Gutkin, Isin Demirsahin, Cibu Johny, Martin Jansche, Supheakmungkol Sarin, and Knot Pipatsrisawat. 2020. Open-source Multi-speaker Speech Corpora for Building Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu Speech Synthesis Systems. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6494–6503, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Open-source Multi-speaker Speech Corpora for Building Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu Speech Synthesis Systems (He et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.800.pdf