Microsoft releases Indian language ‘Speech Corpus’ for researchers

To help researchers and academia build Indian language speech recognition for all applications where speech is used, Microsoft India on Thursday launched its Indian language “Speech Corpus”, offering speech training and test data for Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati. This is the largest publicly available Indian language speech dataset which includes audio and corresponding transcripts, Microsoft said in a statement.

This Indian language “Speech Corpus” content is provided by Microsoft Research Open Data initiative, a collection of free datasets from Microsoft Research to advance research in areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and domain specific sciences.

“Microsoft Indian Language Speech Corpus is an extension of our on-going efforts to reduce language barriers and empower Indians to harness the full potential of the Internet,” said Sundar Srinivasan, General Manager, Artificial Intelligence and Research, Microsoft India.

“Using our technology expertise, we want to accelerate innovation in voice based computing for India by supporting researchers and academia,” Srinivasan said.

Microsoft’s Indian Language Speech Corpus was tested at Interspeech 2018 conference in Hyderabad this month. In a Low Resource Speech Recognition Challenge, participants used data from Microsoft Indian language speech corpus to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems.

They were able to create high quality speech recognition models using this data, thus validating the efficacy of the Corpus, Microsoft said. Microsoft has been working with Indian languages for over two decades since the launch of Project Bhasha in 1998, allowing users to input localised text easily and quickly using the Indian Language Input tool.

Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd.