O-MARC: A multilingual online speech data acquisition for Indian languages

More and more efforts on speech resource development will facilitate advancements in speech technology for spoken languages. Acquisition of speech data is a rigorous task due to high cost and non-availability of suitable speakers. Accessibility to online digital tools will greatly help in speaker availability and easy collection of speech samples. This paper describes an online multilingual audio resource collection interface (O-MARC) for speech samples and is used for three Indian languages i.e. Hindi, Punjabi, and Manipuri. The interface works in a distributed environment and provides a fast and easy collection of speech samples in a variety of recording environment for the prompted text messages. Metadata and the recorded samples are automatically saved to the centralized server and stored in base64 format. This application is accessible on smartphones, desktop/laptop or PDA running any operating system. To address the internet connectivity issue recorded samples are temporarily stored in the local storage that is continuously synchronized with the centralized server. Participant's feedback on the tool is also included in the paper.