KazakhTTS2: Extending the Open-Source Kazakh TTS Corpus With More Data, Speakers, and Topics
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We present an expanded version of our previously released Kazakh text-to-speech (KazakhTTS) synthesis corpus. In the new KazakhTTS2 corpus, the overall size is increased from 93 hours to 271 hours, the number of speakers has risen from two to five (three females and two males), and the topic coverage is diversified with the help of new sources, including a book and Wikipedia articles. This corpus is necessary for building high-quality TTS systems for Kazakh, a Central Asian agglutinative language from the Turkic family, which presents several linguistic challenges. We describe the corpus construction process and provide the details of the training and evaluation procedures for the TTS system. Our experimental results indicate that the constructed corpus is sufficient to build robust TTS models for real-world applications, with a subjective mean opinion score of above 4.0 for all the five speakers. We believe that our corpus will facilitate speech and language research for Kazakh and other Turkic languages, which are widely considered to be low-resource due to the limited availability of free linguistic data. The constructed corpus, code, and pretrained models are publicly available in our GitHub repository.
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