Swiss French PolyPhone and PolyVar: telephone speech databases to model inter- and intra-speaker variability


G. Chollet, J.-L. Cochard, A. Constantinescu, C. Jaboulet, and Ph. Langlais
IDIAP
C.P. 592
CH-1920 Martigny, Switzerland


Following the demand of the speech technology market, a number
of companies and research laboratories joined their forces in order to
produce valuable and reusable resources, especially speech
databases. \\
Serving their purpose, the collected databases are used for
developing, testing, enhancing and evaluating speech technology products,
like interactive voice servers, listening typewriter, speaker verification
and identification systems, \etc. Especially for capturing intra-speaker
variability, the \PolyVar\ database was designed and recorded at \IDIAP, as
a complement to the Swiss French \PolyPhone\ database, which adresses
inter-speaker variability issues.  \\
We will detail in the following the
specific problems of speech database collection (sampling the speaker
population, selection of vocabulary items, \dots), and will present actual
development we carried out at \IDIAP\ throught the \PolyPhone\ and
\PolyVar\ databases.