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Re:WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system buil... by yorwba on Thursday January 18, 2024 @09:19AM (#39041930)
Last I checked, LibriVox had about 11 hours of Mandarin audiobooks and Common Voice has 234 validated hours of "Chinese (China)" (probably corresponding to Mandarin as spoken on the mainland paired with text in Simplified characters, but who knows) and 77 validated hours of "Chinese (Taiwan)" (probably Taiwanese Mandarin paired with Traditional characters).

Not sure whether that's enough data for you. (If you need paired text for the LibriVox audiobooks, I can provide you with versions where I "fixed" the original text to match the audiobook content e.g. when someone skipped a line.)

Re:WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system buil... by freedomben on Thursday January 18, 2024 @10:54AM (#39043286)
Librivox seems like a great source, being public domain, though the quality is highly variable.

I can recommend Elizabeth Klett as a good narrator. I've sampled her recordings of Jane Austen books Emma, pride and prejudice, and sense and sensibility.

Re:WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system buil... by jpcl on Thursday January 18, 2024 @09:36AM (#39042136)
For Polish I have around 700hr. I suspect that we will need less hours if we add more languages since they do overlap to some extent.

Fixed transcripts would be nice although we need to align them with the audio really precisely (we cut the audio into 30 second chunks and we pretty much need to have the exact text in every chunk). It seems this can be solved with forced alignment algorithms but I have not dived into that yet.

Re:WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system buil... by yorwba on Thursday January 18, 2024 @10:40AM (#39043080)
I have forced alignments, too.

E.g. for the True Story of Ah Q https://github.com/Yorwba/LiteratureForEyesAndEars/tree/mast... .align.json is my homegrown alignment format, .srt are standard subtitles, .txt is the text, but note that in some places I have [[original text||what it is pronounced as]] annotations to make the forced alignment work better. (E.g. the "." in LibriVox.org, pronounced as 點 "diǎn" in Mandarin.) Oh, and cmn-Hans is the same thing transliterated into Simplified Chinese.

The corresponding LibriVox URL is predictably https://librivox.org/the-true-story-of-ah-q-by-xun-lu/

Re:WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system buil... by jpcl on Thursday January 18, 2024 @12:14PM (#39044422)
Thanks, I'll check it out. I don't know any Chinese so I'll probably reach out to you for some help :)
Re:WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system buil... by yorwba on Thursday January 18, 2024 @12:17PM (#39044470)
Sure, feel free to email me at the address included in every commit in the repo.
Re:WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system buil... by thorum on Thursday January 18, 2024 @02:27PM (#39046394)
You might check out this list from espnet. They list the different corpuses they use to train their models sorted by language and task (ASR, TTS etc):

https://github.com/espnet/espnet/blob/master/egs2/README.md