@inproceedings{russell-etal-2022-bu,
    title = "{BU}-{TTS}: An Open-Source, Bilingual {W}elsh-{E}nglish, Text-to-Speech Corpus",
    author = "Russell, Stephen  and
      Jones, Dewi  and
      Prys, Delyth",
    editor = "Fransen, Theodorus  and
      Lamb, William  and
      Prys, Delyth",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop within LREC2022",
    month = jun,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.cltw-1.15/",
    pages = "104--109",
    abstract = "This paper presents the design, collection and verification of a bilingual text-to-speech synthesis corpus for Welsh and English. The ever expanding voice collection currently contains almost 10 hours of recordings from a bilingual, phonetically balanced text corpus. The speakers consist of a professional voice actor and three amateur contributors, with male and female accents from north and south Wales. This corpus provides audio-text pairs for building and training high-quality bilingual Welsh-English neural based TTS systems. We describe the process by which we created a phonetically balanced prompt set and the challenges of attempting to collate such a dataset during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our initial findings in validating the corpus via the implementation of a state-of-the-art TTS models are presented. This corpus represents the first open-source Welsh language corpus large enough to capitalise on neural TTS architectures."
}