This Speech corpus has been developed as part of PhD work carried out by Nawar Halabi at the University of Southampton. The corpus was recorded in south Levantine Arabic (Damascian accent) using a professional studio. Synthesized speech as an output using this corpus has produced a high quality, natural voice.

It is released here under the creative commons license specified below. In case further rights are required, or you require consultancy for building Arabic speech corpora, please contact Nawar Halabi by email. Thank you for your interest.

Download Corpus Package

Developing and hosting the corpus costs time and money. You are welcome to make a contribution if you think we deserve it :)

• 1813 .wav files containing spoken utterances.
• 1813 .lab files containing text utterances.
• 1813 .TextGrid files containing the phoneme labels with time stamps of the boundaries where these occur in the .wav files. These files can be opened using Praat software.
• phonetic-transcript.txt which has the form "[wav_filename]" "[Phoneme Sequence]" in every line.
• orthographic-transcript.txt which has the form "[wav_filename]" "[Orthographic Transcript]" in every line. Orthography is in Buckwalter Format which is friendlier where there is software that does not read Arabic script. It can be easily converted back to Arabic.
• There is an extra 18 minutes of fully annotated corpus (separate from above but with the same structure as above) which was used to evaluted the corpus (see PhD thesis). Feel free to use it in your applications.

More documentation will be added in the future. Please refer to Nawar Halabi's PhD Thesis for more details. Please note that the apostrophe which follows some vowel phonemes in the corpus indicates that the vowel is in a stressed syllable. Feel free to visit the Arabic Speech Corpus Wikipedia page for more information about the corpus.

https://github.com/nawarhalabi/festival-tts-arabic-voices-docker In this repo there is a Docker image for this TTS server which can run on most platforms easily

Thank you very much to Taha Zerrouki, Ahmad Barqawi, Karim Hemina and Oussama Hemina for their work to produce this TTS:

1. Festival for Arabic
2. Mishkal Diacritiser
3. Shakkala Diacritiser

Thank you to Ali Hamdi, Ibrahim Tuffaha, Baraa' Al-Jawarneh and Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub for their work on Shakkelha which is the best diacritiser as far as I know. https://github.com/AliOsm/shakkelha

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Arabic Speech Corpus by Nawar Halabi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.arabicspeechcorpus.com.

Developing and hosting the corpus costs time and money. You are welcome to make a contribution if you think we deserve it :)