Building a Public Domain Voice Database for Odia

Projects like Mozilla Common Voice were born to address the challenges of unavailability of voice data or the high cost of available data for use in speech technology such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research and application development. The pilot detailed in this paper is about creating a large freely-licensed public repository of transcribed speech in the Odia language as such a repository was not known to be available. The strategy and methodology behind this process are based on the OpenSpeaks project. Licensed under a Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0), the repository currently includes audio recordings of pronunciations for more than 55,000 unique words in Odia, including more than 5,600 recordings of words in the northern Odia dialect Baleswari. No known public listing of words in this dialect was found by the author prior to this pilot. This repository is arguably the most extensive transcribed speech corpus in Odia that is also available publicly under any free and open license. This paper details the strategy, approach, and process behind building both the text and the speech corpus using many open source tools such as Lingua Libre, which can be helpful in building text and speech data for different low-medium-resource languages.