We present a shoal of voices in Storspigg–TBI, a legally cleared, professionally recorded Swedish speech corpus derived from talking-book production at the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM). The corpus contains 1 000 information messages read by 99 narrators under controlled studio conditions. The material has undergone full legal assessment and a three-sweep adoption process ensuring provenance, FAIR/FACT compliance, and reproducibility in collaboration with the national research infrastructure Språkbanken Tal. The paper describes the legal framework, data-selection and curation pipeline, as well as initial automatic transcription using Swedish Whisper and wav2vec 2.0 models. The resulting corpus provides a high-quality reference resource for speech science and technology, supporting research on inter-speaker variation, prosody, and evaluation under consistent acoustic and linguistic conditions.

With this paper, we release a Swedish pronunciation lexicon resource, Braxen 1.0, which is the result of almost 20 years development carried out at the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM). The lexicon originated with a basic word list, but has continuously been exanded with new entries, mainly acquired from university textbooks and news text. Braxen consists of around 850 000 entries, of which around 150 000 are proper names. The lexicon is released under the CC BY 4.0 license and is accessible for public use.

In order to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of Audience Response System (ARS) in text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) evaluations, we revisit three previously published TTS studies and perform an ARS-based evaluation on the stimuli used in each study. The experiments are performed with a participant pool of 39 respondents, using a web-based tool that emulates an ARS experiment. The results of the first experiment confirms that ARS is highly useful for evaluating long and continuous stimuli, particularly if we wish for a diagnostic result rather than a single overall metric, while the second and third experiments highlight weaknesses in ARS with unsuitable materials as well as the importance of framing and instruction when conducting ARS-based evaluation.