Building a Rich Arabic Speech Database

Availability of databases is a necessity in the speech processing field. The publically available databases in Arabic language are few. In this paper we describe a rich database for Arabic language. The database is rich in many dimensions: in text, environments, microphone type, number of recording sessions, recording system, the transmission channel, the country of origin, and the mother language. This richness makes the database an important resource for research in Arabic Language processing and very useful in many speech processing tasks, such as speaker recognition, speech recognition, and accent identification. The speakers were speaking in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).