The corpus contains speech data of 2 Czech native speakers, male and female. The speech is very precisely articulated up to hyper-articulated, and the speech rate is low. The speech data with a highlighted articulation is suitable for teaching foreigners the Czech language, and it can also be used for people with hearing or speech impairment. The recorded sentences can be used either directly, e.g., as a part of educational material, or as source data for building complex educational systems incorporating speech synthesis technology. All recorded sentences were precisely orthographically annotated and phonetically segmented, i.e., split into phones, using modern neural network-based methods.
The corpus contains Czech speech of laryngectomy patients recorded before a surgery causing their voice to be lost in order to preserve the voice which can be later used for personalized text-to-speech system. Individual utterances were selected from the language by a special algorithm to cover as much phonetic and prosodic features as possible.
This text corpus contains a carefully optimized set of sentences that could be used in the process of preparing a speech corpus for the development of personalized text-to-speech system. It was designed primarily for the voice conservation procedure that must be performed in a relatively short period before a person loses his/her own voice, typically because of the total laryngectomy.
Total laryngectomy is a radical treatment procedure which is often unavoidable to save life of patients who were diagnosed with severe laryngeal cancer. In spite of being very effective with respect to the primary treatment, it significantly handicaps the patients due to the permanent loss of their ability to use voice and produce speech. Luckily, the modern methods of computer text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis offer a possibility for "digital conservation" of patient's original voice for his/her future speech communication -- a procedure called voice banking or voice conservation. Moreover, the banking procedure can be undertaken by any person facing voice degradation or loss in farther future, or who is simply is willing to keep his/her voice-print.