Announcing the Carnegie SpeechTM YOUTH database

[Maxine Eskenazi <max+@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Announcing the Carnegie SpeechTM YOUTH
database

The Carnegie SpeechTM Company is proud to
announce a new database of childrens speech, YOUTH, available for use by
both research and industry sites. 

Contents:
The database was recorded in two schools in the suburbs of Pittsburgh
during the fall of 2001. It contains the speech of 135 children reading
isolated words, phrases and sentences from Nursery Rhymes and other
classic tales in American English such as Peter Pan. The utterances were
automatically chosen for their richness in triphone coverage. There are
an average of 184 utterances per child, making a total of 25,122
utterances for the whole database. The children are 8  10 year old
(in third and fourth grade) and assessed as good readers by their
teachers. Some, but not all of the utterances are the same for all
speakers. The children come from upper middle class suburban families,
many of whom are not native to the region, and therefore do not manifest
a Pittsburgh dialect. We did record a few non-native children, a few who
have colds, and a few who have speech impediments. There is a spreadsheet
included that indicates these details for each speaker.

Cost:
Cost is $2000 for research institutions, for research purposes only and
$15,000 for industrial concerns and can be used commercial products with
no royalties.

You can find more information and hear examples at
http://www.carnegiespeech.com/products/youthdb

If you are interested in getting more information or in
licensing the database, please contact:

Dr. Maxine Eskenazi
President
Carnegie SpeechTM Co.
www.carnegiespeech.com
4619 Newell Simon Hall
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213   USA
Email: max@cs.cmu.edu
Tel 1-412-268-3858