\`{I}r\`{o}y\`{i}nSpeech: A multi-purpose Yor\`{u}b\'{a} Speech Corpus

TL;DR

IroyinSpeech is a comprehensive Yorùbá speech corpus designed for TTS and ASR, featuring 42 hours of high-quality recordings and demonstrating effective speech synthesis and recognition capabilities with minimal data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new Yorùbá speech corpus with open licensing, crowd-sourced data collection, and baseline evaluations for TTS and ASR tasks, advancing Yorùbá language technology.

Findings

High-fidelity Yorùbá TTS achievable with 5 hours of data

Baseline ASR WER of 23.8% on the corpus

Open, crowd-sourced Yorùbá speech dataset created

Abstract

We introduce \`{I}r\`{o}y\`{i}nSpeech, a new corpus influenced by the desire to increase the amount of high quality, contemporary Yor\`{u}b\'{a} speech data, which can be used for both Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. We curated about 23000 text sentences from news and creative writing domains with the open license CC-BY-4.0. To encourage a participatory approach to data creation, we provide 5000 curated sentences to the Mozilla Common Voice platform to crowd-source the recording and validation of Yor\`{u}b\'{a} speech data. In total, we created about 42 hours of speech data recorded by 80 volunteers in-house, and 6 hours of validated recordings on Mozilla Common Voice platform. Our TTS evaluation suggests that a high-fidelity, general domain, single-speaker Yor\`{u}b\'{a} voice is possible with as little as 5 hours of speech. Similarly, for ASR we obtained a baseline word error rate (WER) of 23.8.