Speech Banking Dictionary - your speech bank list?

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robc

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I am starting to have slight problems with my tongue.. nothing too major, but I'd like to start voice banking. I know thousands of people have headed down this path before & I'm sure many have wished they had recorded something they hadn't thought about.

Is anyone aware of a list of most commonly used phrases, some sort of voice banking "dictionary"? If not, if others are willing to share a text list of phrases that they have included in their speech bank, please let me know & I would be glad to compile a master list & put it on the web as a living document that people can share, add to, etc.

Thanks!

Rob Chadwick
 
What you'll want to do is google search for a "phrase corpus."
 
Rob look through this link, there has been a lot of discussion about the voice banking:
https://www.alsforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7876

If you decide to go the Model Talker route, after the trial recording you upload to them are accepted, they will add a full inventory of words and phrases for you to record. There is also a section of suggested personal phrases to add.

Anything you regularly or even occasionally might want to say that strictly does not follow phonetic rules, to where a computer might have problems with correct pronunciation, (for example "armoire" ~ then, of course you might never want to use this word, and it might be you would have reason to want to say "pinochle" instead) or just favorite expressions are important to record somewhere. Think about what you say when you're surprised, angry, happy, silly.... do you use explicatives? Do you say phrases like " cool man", or " what we have is a failure to communicate" (complete with the Paul Newman accent) ... these are things that will make it more "you".

If you think about your life history, your interests, your loved ones names, address, it helps come up with categories.

I wish I had added more than I did, I was burned out after recording the inventory, I was so intent on getting it completed, glad I did, but wish I'd added more personal phrases.
 
hi rose... was your voice banking an emotional experience? i mean, did it upset you? you were very brave to do what you did.
 
rocmg,

I think it was not so much upsetting, as I felt like there was so much riding on it, and when I'd have problems getting my recording to be good enough to be accepted it would get to me. Eventually I learned (even though mentally I already knew it) to just take a break when I was spinning my wheels. Now that its done, I still need to work on tweaking it so it sounds a much as possible as I do.

I really wish I'd done more personal phrases. The custom words and phrases are not synthesized, so its my own voice, which what I'd prefer to be heard when possible.

Some of the random things I added had to do with the pets here. I remember I recorded "he's delicate" (what I always jokingly say about the 22 pound cat) and "he has seasonal allergies" (cat again) ... and because so much of my life still is affected by travel, I recorded little questions unique to common conversations I have now, things like "What gate are you going out of?" etc.

A funny story about how I was grasping at what I should custom record.... I made sure to record the word fuchsia ~ but then I wasn't even sure how to spell it, had to double check that, then realized I'd also have to remember how to spell it if I ever wanted to say it LOL.
 
If you go to the front page of this site on the left side of the page click on guides and manuals and in there is a few pages of phrases under Guidelines for speech and voice banking.

AL.
 
Thanks everyone. I'm pretty tech savvy (managed software product development for a number of years) & at this point I'm less concerned with the technology and more concerned with coming up with as robust a speech bank as possible.

If others would be willing to share a list of the phrases they have speech banked with me, I will compile them in a database by category and publish them on the internet as a living, changing guide for others that are starting to build their speech banks. If someone has already done this, I'd love to know & help in any way I can.

Ultimately I would like to see a shared speech bank repository that would allow you to perhaps even find others that have a voice similar to yours where you could download audio files of banked speech that you hadn't original thought to bank. You could even take this one step further and open it up to people who do voice impersonations to record on behalf of PALS. Just brainstorming here.

In any case, if you're willing to share your voice bank phrase list with me, please contact me. I don't need the audio files themselves, just a list of the phrases you have recorded.

Thanks!

Rob Chadwick
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_corpus

To some extent its been done for free. There are firms that specialize in it.

I believe that what you are referring to here, Maverick, are the actual recordings of speech that are usually used to do things like training speech recognition software systems. I don't think that this is what Rob is looking for just yet.

If others would be willing to share a list of the phrases they have speech banked with me, I will compile them in a database by category and publish them on the internet as a living, changing guide for others that are starting to build their speech banks. If someone has already done this, I'd love to know & help in any way I can.

Rob, I think "phrase book" is probably a more precise and less confusing term for what you are asking for.

Ultimately I would like to see a shared speech bank repository that would allow you to perhaps even find others that have a voice similar to yours where you could download audio files of banked speech that you hadn't original thought to bank. You could even take this one step further and open it up to people who do voice impersonations to record on behalf of PALS. Just brainstorming here.

That's a great idea.

In any case, if you're willing to share your voice bank phrase list with me, please contact me. I don't need the audio files themselves, just a list of the phrases you have recorded.

I would also be interested in such a list, if we can put one together. I am currently working on a project to provide a better quality free voice software package for people who have lost their ability to speak, but can still operate a regular laptop or desktop computer well enough to enter text into a text-to-speech interface program. Call it a first step or interim stage before we need the more expensive devices, since we can use existing computers for as long as we are able to use them.

The particular software platform that I am basing this system on has a program which will accept phrase books in a particular XML format. If I had a list of phrases/sentences, it's not very difficult to reformat such a list into the XML format used by the program.
 
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