Crowd-Sourced Speech Corpora for Javanese, Sundanese, Sinhala, Nepali, and Bangladeshi Bengali

We present speech corpora for Javanese, Sundanese, Sinhala, Nepali, and Bangladeshi Bengali. Each corpus consists of an average of approximately 200k recorded utterances that were provided by native-speaker volunteers in the respective region. Recordings were made using portable consumer electronics in reasonably quiet environments. For each recorded utterance the textual prompt and an anonymized hexadecimal identifier of the speaker are available. Biographical information of the speakers is unavailable. In particular, the speakers come from an unspeci-fied mix of genders. The recordings are suitable for research on acoustic modeling for speech recognition, for example. To validate the integrity of the corpora and their suitability for speech recognition research, we provide simple recipes that illustrate how they can be used with the open-source Kaldi speech recognition toolkit. The corpora are being made available under a Creative Commons license in the hope that they will stimulate further research on these languages.