VoiceBank-2023: A Multi-Speaker Mandarin Speech Corpus for Constructing Personalized TTS Systems for the Speech Impaired

TL;DR

VoiceBank-2023 is a comprehensive Mandarin speech corpus designed to facilitate personalized TTS systems for speech-impaired individuals, especially ALS patients, with detailed annotations and evaluations.

Contribution

This paper introduces the VoiceBank-2023 corpus, including its design, recording process, data cleaning, and evaluation of personalized TTS systems for Mandarin speakers with impairments.

Findings

Corpus contains 29.78 hours of speech from 111 speakers.

Includes detailed annotations like gender, impairment level, and speaking rate.

Evaluations demonstrate the corpus's effectiveness for personalized TTS development.

Abstract

Services of personalized TTS systems for the Mandarin-speaking speech impaired are rarely mentioned. Taiwan started the VoiceBanking project in 2020, aiming to build a complete set of services to deliver personalized Mandarin TTS systems to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. This paper reports the corpus design, corpus recording, data purging and correction for the corpus, and evaluations of the developed personalized TTS systems, for the VoiceBanking project. The developed corpus is named after the VoiceBank-2023 speech corpus because of its release year. The corpus contains 29.78 hours of utterances with prompts of short paragraphs and common phrases spoken by 111 native Mandarin speakers. The corpus is labeled with information about gender, degree of speech impairment, types of users, transcription, SNRs, and speaking rates. The VoiceBank-2023 is available by request for non-commercial use and welcomes all parties to join the VoiceBanking project to improve the services for the speech impaired.