JSUT corpus: free large-scale Japanese speech corpus for end-to-end speech synthesis

TL;DR

The JSUT corpus is a large-scale, freely available Japanese speech dataset designed to facilitate end-to-end speech synthesis research, covering all main pronunciations and consisting of 10 hours of speech data.

Contribution

This paper introduces the first comprehensive large-scale Japanese speech corpus specifically designed for end-to-end speech synthesis, filling a significant resource gap.

Findings

Corpus covers all main Japanese pronunciations

Contains 10 hours of speech data

Freely available online

Abstract

Thanks to improvements in machine learning techniques including deep learning, a free large-scale speech corpus that can be shared between academic institutions and commercial companies has an important role. However, such a corpus for Japanese speech synthesis does not exist. In this paper, we designed a novel Japanese speech corpus, named the "JSUT corpus," that is aimed at achieving end-to-end speech synthesis. The corpus consists of 10 hours of reading-style speech data and its transcription and covers all of the main pronunciations of daily-use Japanese characters. In this paper, we describe how we designed and analyzed the corpus. The corpus is freely available online.