Recent Advances of Speech Databases Development Activity for Indian Languages

Development of Speech Corpora and acoustic–phonetic data bases are indispensable for any research and development work in spoken language systems. Systematic efforts have been made to create speech databases for some major languages of India. The paper attempts to present the status and the recent advancements made in corpora development for some of the Indian languages. Different types of databases developed include text corpora for speech, annotated/non-annotated speech corpora, acoustic-phonetic and labeled speech databases, special speech corpora etc. These have been developed for general purpose as well as task oriented applications. Databases of a few Indian languages have been developed in a well designed manner which includes adequate representation of textual / linguistic information, regional/dialectal variations, speaking styles and environments etc. These databases have been used for developing systems such as Text to Speech synthesis, Speech recognition, Speaker identification, speech secrecy, language translation and forensic applications etc.