S0018 : German Polyphone database (SpeechDat(M))

The German SpeechDat(M) database contains the recordings of 1,000 German speakers from the 16 German states, who were recorded over the fixed telephone network. A particular care of a balance with respect to the gender (males, females) and to the age of the speakers (between 16 and 65) was given.

The database consists of read speech. A prompt sheet with a unique identification number has been distributed to the potential callers. The speech files are stored as sequences of 8 bit 8 kHz A-law samples.

Callers could call from any kind of acoustic and network environment: home, business, mobile phone, phone booth, wired or cordless phone, etc. (No controlled distribution).

It was validated by SPEX (the Netherlands) to assess its compliance with the SpeechDat format and content specifications.

Each speaker uttered the following items:

• several speech sequences, including sentences from different sources (local newspapers, existing corpora, law articles, etc.) to ensure a good phonetic coverage,
• application words from a defined list of command words,
• digits (isolated digits, connected digits, and natural numbers),
• currency amounts,
• quantities,
• credit card numbers,
• spelled words (mainly names),
• time of day (spontaneous) and time phrase (prompted, word style),
• city of call/birth, etc.