Speech recordings via the internet: An overview of the VOYS project in Scotland

Abstract

The VOYS (Voices of Young Scots) project aims to establish a speech database of adolescent Scottish speakers. This database will serve for speech recognition technology and sociophonetic research. 300 pupils will ultimately be recorded at secondary schools in 10 locations in Scotland. Recordings are performed via the Internet using two microphones (closetalk and desktop) in 22,05 kHz 16 bit linear stereo signal quality.

VOYS is the first large-scale and cross-boundary speech data collection based on the WikiSpeech content management system for speech resources. In VOYS, schools receive a kit containing the microphones and A/D interface and they organise the recordings themselves. The recorded data is immediately uploaded to the server in Munich, alleviating the schools from all data-handling tasks. This paper outlines the corpus specification, describes the technical issues, summarises the signal quality and gives a status report.