LATINO-40 Spanish Read News

<p>This database provides a set of recordings for training speaker-independent systems that recognize Latin-American Spanish. It was recorded by the Entropic Research Laboratory in the period from July 11 through September 9 1994 in Palo Alto, California. The database comprises about 5,000 utterances files. These files include about 125 utterances from each of 40 different speakers, 20 male and 20 female.</p><br>
<p>The recordings were all made with a high-quality, head-mounted microphone (Shure SM10A) in an office environment, and the utterances were digitized in 16-bit samples at 16 kHz.</p><br>
<p>The Linguistic Data Consortium provided 13,000 sentences that had been selected from Latin American newspaper text by people working at Texas Instruments. The sentences are all shorter than 80 characters and are not grouped into larger constituents such as paragraphs or stories. The speech files have NIST SPHERE headers and are presented in compressed format, using the shorten speech compression algorithm developed by Tony Robinson at Cambridge Univesity, as implemented in the NIST SPHERE software package. This software is included with the data.</p></br>
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