Services

Our team consisting of phoneticians, linguists and engineers offers the following services:

Design of speech databases
Depending on the aim of your application we create the reading scripts, set up recording protocols, plan the most suitable speaker recruitment strategy in order to achieve the desired product in the most efficient way.

Recording of speech databases
Building on our experience in projects like SpeechDat and CGN we record read and spontaneous speech, dialogues and lectures, both over a telephone connection as well as directly through the microphone, in quiet home/office environments but also in noisy public places or cars.

Annotation of speech databases
Database annotation is a time-consuming and prone-to-errors activity. Throughout the years we have developed procedures which allow us to provide efficient and consistent annotations. Depending on your requirements we can provide transcriptions at the orthographic or phonetic level, transcriptions of non-speech events, part-of-speech tags, alignment of speech signals and transcriptions. Being based at the university campus we have easy access to part-time workforce of native speakers of Dutch as well as other languages.

Validation of speech databases
In a number of international speech data collections (e.g. SPEECON, OrienTel, previously SpeechDat) where large commercial and academic consortia are involved, we check the quality of databases collected by various partners in order to guarantee the same level of quality. Errors can best be spotted by an independent party not involved in the collection itself. If you are subcontracting your data collection, we can provide you with a quality stamp for the resulting database in a systematic and thorough manner. We also offer advice on how to achieve a high level of quality of your database internally.

Creation of phonetic lexicons
A phonetic lexicon determines to a large extent the usability of a speech database. We possess extensive expertise in creating phonetic lexicons for Dutch lexical words as well as names. For several other languages we have a network of phoneticians who cooperate with us.