Amharic

Questions File

The questions file for Amharic lives here:
/proj/tts/voices/merlin/misc/questions/questions_amharic_v3.hed

Babel Conversational Data

HTS baseline: /proj/tts/voices/babel/amharic
David has trained a Merlin baseline as well as many 4-hour subset voices. These are located here:
/proj/tts/voices/merlin/egs/build_your_own_voice/s1/experiments

This data had the wav/sph issue that we encountered in a lot of the babel data. Use amharic_sphonly and amharic_sphtxt.

Some phonemes have > and < in their names, which will break things further down the pipeline, so they get replaced with GT and LT in the names. The scripts do the renaming in some places but not others, so we had to make sure they got changed everywhere. Thanks to David for creating a patch to resolve this -- speech lab students can find it under /proj/tts/examples/babel_scripts to see how it was fixed, but the patch has been applied to the main script so you don't need to do anything different.

Rare phonemes in loan words had to get merged with similar phonemes to contain enough data for HTS voice training.

The phoneme 1 was automatically marked as a consonant in the phoneset.scm file. This results in "novowel" for the "syllable vowel" feature when you do utt->lab conversion. We just changed this by hand and then re-did the utt->lab conversion (remember to select the Amharic voice for DUMPFEATS in the Makefile).

There were still some special character phonemes that were not brackets, that had to get mapped to HTS-compatible phoneme names in the utt phase. These were 1 -> one, @ -> at, and # -> wb.

Babel Read Speech

Elshadai has trained some voices with this data, but they ended up sounding a lot worse than we expected, and we're not sure why. She even created a hand-selected set of high-quality utterances and re-aligned, but the output from the trained voice still sounds worse than we'd expect. This voice (along with the scp file saying which utterances were used) is here:
/proj/tts/tools/ebiru/merlin/egs/build_your_own_voice/s1/experiments/male_scripted_cleanv1

Audio Bible

This data was collected and segmented by David. Data can be found under /proj/tts/data/amharic/bible.
Voices can be found under /proj/tts/voices/merlin/egs/build_your_own_voice/s1/experiments/.

Omniglot and Field Support

Collected by Olivia. I don't think there was enough data by itself to build a voice but we could potentially use for adaptation experiments.

Read Religious Texts

Data currently being prepared by Yishak.