Libraries of audio samples (spoken text)

Question

For a project we're currently working on, we need a library of spoken words in many different languages.

Two options seem possible: text-to-speech or "real" recordings by native speakers. As the quality is important to us, we're thinking about going the latter path.

In order to create a prototype for our application, we're looking for libraries that contain as many words in different languages as possible. To get a feeling for the quality of our approach, this library should not be made up of synthesized speech.

Do you know of any available/accessible libraries?

Answer 1

A co-worker just found this community based library, which is nice, but rather small in size:

Forvo.com

Answer 2

Not sure how much spoked words they have there but I liked this place http://www.freesound.org/

Answer 3

I've just found this on the Audacity wiki: VoxForge. From their site:

VoxForge was set up to collect transcribed speech for use with Free and Open Source Speech Recognition Engines (on Linux, Windows and Mac).

We will make available all submitted audio files under the GPL license, and then 'compile' them into acoustic models for use with Open Source speech recognition engines such as Sphinx, ISIP, Julius and HTK (note: HTK has distribution restrictions).

Answer 4

There is also Old time radio, not sure if this is the sort of spoken word you're after though.

Answer 5

My guess is that you won't find a library anywhere that consists of just individual words. Whatever you find, you're going to have to open the audio up in an editor (like Pro Tools or Cool Edit) and chop it up into individual words.

You would probably be better off creating a list of all the words you need for each language, and then finding native speakers to read them while you record. You can have them read slowly, so that you'll have an easy time chopping up each individual word.