An English language speech database at the University of Western Australia

The authors present a report on the content and status of a major speech database collection effort. The goal is to collect a useful set of speech material from a very large number of speakers. These speakers are drawn from a wide cross-section of the local community with a variety of ethnic and educational backgrounds. Speech materials include isolated digits and numbers, vowels and voiced phonemes, connected digits, and phonetically balanced sentences. Speech signals are encoded into 16-bit pulse code modulation (PCM) format and stored on Betamax format video tapes. In the seven months since this project started, speech from 100 speakers has been collected. A statistical breakdown of the backgrounds of the speakers is presented