Loquacious Set: 25,000 Hours of Transcribed and Diverse English Speech Recognition Data for Research and Commercial Use

TL;DR

The Loquacious Set is a large, diverse, and commercially usable English speech dataset of 25,000 hours, aimed at advancing ASR research with real-world speech variability.

Contribution

It introduces a new extensive speech dataset that overcomes limitations of previous datasets, supporting both academic and industrial ASR development.

Findings

Contains 25,000 hours of diverse English speech

Includes hundreds of thousands of speakers with various accents

Designed for real-world ASR research and commercial applications

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) research is driven by the availability of common datasets between industrial researchers and academics, encouraging comparisons and evaluations. LibriSpeech, despite its long success as an ASR benchmark, is now limited by its size and focus on clean, read speech, leading to near-zero word error rates. More recent datasets, including MOSEL, YODAS, Gigaspeech, OWSM, Libriheavy or People's Speech suffer from major limitations including licenses that researchers in the industry cannot use, unreliable transcriptions, incorrect audio data, or the lack of evaluation sets. This work presents the Loquacious Set, a 25,000-hour curated collection of commercially usable English speech. Featuring hundreds of thousands of speakers with diverse accents and a wide range of speech types (read, spontaneous, talks, clean, noisy), the Loquacious Set is designed to work for academics and researchers in the industry to build ASR systems in real-world scenarios.