National project to hear Canberra’s voices

Photo by david Wilkinson

Canberrans can literally have their say in a new research project to record the Aussie accent.

Researchers from the University of Canberra and The Australian National University are involved in the national AusTalk initiative which will record the voices and faces of 1000 speakers of all ages from around the country. Canberrans are invited to apply.

By recording and documenting the diversity of Australian accents the project has implications for everything from ordering pizza over the phone to evaluating forensic voice evidence. It will help develop technologies to help deaf people and those with learning difficulties.

It will also help define the Aussie accent.

‘We have this image of the Australian accent, but at the moment we don’t even have enough data to know what we really mean by Aussie accents,’ Kinoshita said.

‘There has never been a large-scale collection of audio-video speech data in Australia, which also includes real conversational speech.’

The ANU team of Shunichi Ishihara and Adjunct Professor Philip Rose is working with Kinoshita on forensic voice comparison for Australian English.

‘The availability of the AusTalk data will considerably enhance the reliability of forensic voice comparisons in Australia,’ Ishihara said.

As well as providing a permanent record of Australian English and supporting research in the fields such as speech science and linguisitics, AusTalk will also support a range of speech technologies such as voice and face recognition and authentication in banking and taxi services. The database will enhance such applications as hearing aids, cochlear implants for the deaf and better computer aids for learning-impaired children.

The UC team of Kinoshita, Professor Michael Wagner, Roland Goecke, Girija Chetty and Associate Professor Dat Tran is particularly interested in making speech technologies such as speech and speaker recognition work better for Australian accents. The team is also working on estimating some characteristics in voice and facial expressions, such as gender and age and even whether a caller is happy, angry or depressed.

AusTalk is supported by the Australian Research Council and 11 participating universities.

To volunteer for the AusTalk project:

Anyone over 18, who has had all their schooling in Australia, is invited to be part of the national collection of Australian English accents. Participants will be recorded on three separate occasions, reading words and sentences, having a conversation, and playing a game with another participant. Speakers with foreign accents will be recorded in the second stage of the project.