I just downloaded the VoxForge dictionary (2.6 MB), and opened it with Notepad++. Obviously, it is encoded in ANSI, not in UTF-8. That’s OK because it does contain just standard characters. I am guessing that this dictionary is compatible with ASCII. But I would suggest that future versions should be published in UTF-8.
Posts Tagged ‘VoxForge’
VoxForge dictionary isn’t encoded in UTF-8
Saturday, June 21st, 2008How can I create an acoustic model with Sphinx?
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008I have just read this article. It is a good idea to donate speech to the VoxForge project. But at the moment, I do have a different question: how is it possible to create an acoustic model (after you have donated some speech)? At the moment, there are acoustic models in the development for the English, Dutch, German and Russian language. Obviously, all (or most) of them are created with CMU Sphinx. But how do you use CMU Sphinx? This is one of the main questions I do have at the moment. It is not easy to find the answer, but I am trying. It should be possible to use Sphinx (and German or English speech files) to create an acoustic model (German or English). But how is it possible to achieve this goal? It would be helpful if there were a good documentation out there. Probably there is, but it is not easy to get involved.
Screencast: transcribing prompts, encoding into FLAC, creating ZIP archive, submitting to VoxForge
Friday, February 15th, 2008I have just recorded a Screencast. This Screencast shows the following steps in the process of creating/submitting prompts in the German language to the VoxForge project. In detail:
- taking a look at the prompts.txt file using Notepad++,
- transcribing several wav files using Dragon NaturallySpeaking into text,
- comparing the transcribed text with the corresponding line in the prompts.txt file,
- encoding 99 wav files into the FLAC format using FLAC front-end. This step reduces the file size from one hundred percent to about forty percent.
- copy and paste the content of the files “readme.txt”, “prompts.txt” and “license-english.txt” from the Notepad++ into the Web form of VoxForge speech submission system,
- creating a zip archive using 7-Zip,
- and finally submitting the whole zip archive from the personal desktop to the VoxForge website.
Download the screencast (about 12 megabytes). This Screencast contains some explanations. It is not perfect, but you should get an impression what to do, if you want to contribute your speech to the VoxForge project.
You can see that it is not very easy to create those prompts. But it is not impossible. There are just a lot of steps that have to be done. And we are using very powerful tools to create the prompts.
