"ARCTIC -- A standard phonetically balanced speech database for
speech synthesis research"
John Kominek and Alan W Black

Although there are many standardized databases for evaluating speech
recognition research there are almost none for speech synthesis.  In
order to help address this issue we have constructed new single speaker
phonetically balanced databases that will be distributed without
restriction for use in evaluation, algorithm comparison and as
base-line voices for the speech synthesis community.

This talk will present the motivation behind providing these as well as
a detailed description of how they were designed, recorded and how
baseline voices are built.  We will also present our intention for
their use in the immediate future.