The Austrian Language Project

The Austrian Language Project (T-ALP) aims to improve automatic speech recognition of Austrian German. Specifically, it focuses on Austrian German as it is typically spoken in the media such as TV and radio as well as podcasts but, at least at present, does not try to cover the wide dialectal and sociolectal variety of German spoken in Austria. The project was presented at the conference Building a European Cultural Backbone (ECB2022) at the Stadtwerkstadt in Linz, Austria.

I initially became involved in this project when I met Alexander Baratsits, one of the founders of the Cultural Broadcasting Archive (CBA). The …

more ...

Kaldi recipe for Mozilla's Common Voice corpus

Note: This is about a recipe for the original, English-only Common Voice corpus released in 2018. Subsequent releases with data for various languages are not compatible with this recipe.

Recently, Mozilla published a first version of their Common Voice corpus. It consists of speech prompts from an unknown number of speakers (no speaker IDs are provided due to privacy concerns, see this forum thread). About 254 hours have been validated by multiple listeners. The data has been split into pre-defined training, development and test sets.

I created an initial Kaldi recipe for the corpus as a research exercise. It has …

more ...

Interspeech 2016 special event "Speaker Comparison for Forensic and Investigative Applications II"

I am going to be contributing to the special event titled "Speaker Comparison for Forensic and Investigative Applications II" at Interspeech 2016, held on September 10 at 10:00 am in the Grand Ballroom of the Hyatt Regency, San Francisco.

I am also presenting a paper on likelihood ratio calculation in acoustic-phonetic forensic voice comparison at Interspeech on Friday 9 at 2:00 pm in Room Seacliff BCD.

more ...

Multi-laboratory evaluation of forensic voice comparison systems

Geoff Morrison and I are running a Multi-laboratory evaluation of forensic voice comparison systems under conditions reflecting those of a real forensic case (forensic_eval_01).

There is increasing pressure on forensic laboratories to validate the performance of forensic analysis systems before they are used to assess strength of evidence for presentation in court. Different forensic voice comparison systems may use different approaches, and even among systems using the same general approach there can be substantial differences in operational details. From case to case, the relevant population, speaking styles, and recording conditions can be highly variable, but it is common to have …

more ...