We have developed an open source web reader in Iceland for under-resourced languages. The web reader was developed due to the need for a free and good quality web reader for languages which fall outside the scope of commercially available web readers. It relies on a text-to-speech (TTS) pipeline accessed via a cloud service. The web reader was developed using the Icelandic TTS voices Alfur and Dilja, but could be connected to any language which has a TTS pipeline. The design of our web reader focuses on functionality, adaptability and user friendliness. Therefore, the web reader’s feature set heavily overlaps with the minimal features necessary to provide a good web reading experience while still being extensible enough to be adapted to work for other languages, high-resourced and under-resourced. The web reader works well on all the major web browsers and has a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level AA: Acceptable compliance, meaning that it works well for the largest user groups, people in under-resourced languages with visual impairments and difficulty reading. The code for our web reader is available and published with an Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/cadia-lvl/WebRICE, which includes a simple demo of the project.

This contribution describes an ongoing project of speech data collection, using the web application Samrómur which is built upon Common Voice, Mozilla Foundation’s web platform for open-source voice collection. The goal of the project is to build a large-scale speech corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Icelandic. Upon completion, Samrómur will be the largest open speech corpus for Icelandic collected from the public domain. We discuss the methods used for the crowd-sourcing effort and show the importance of marketing and good media coverage when launching a crowd-sourcing campaign. Preliminary results exceed our expectations, and in one month we collected data that we had estimated would take three months to obtain. Furthermore, our initial dataset of around 45 thousand utterances has good demographic coverage, is gender-balanced and with proper age distribution. We also report on the task of validating the recordings, which we have not promoted, but have had numerous hours invested by volunteers.