Corpus

Description

This page presents an expressive French audiobooks corpus containing eighty seven hours of good audio quality speech, recorded by a single amateur speaker reading audiobooks of different literary genres. This corpus departs from existing corpora collected from audiobooks since they usually provide a few hours of mono-genre and multi-speaker speech. The motivation for setting up such a corpus is to explore expressiveness from different perspectives, such as discourse styles, prosody, and pronunciation, and using different levels of analysis (syllable, prosodic and lexical word, prosodic and syntactic phrase, utterance or paragraph). This will allow developing models to better control expressiveness in speech synthesis, and to adapt pronunciation and prosody to specific discourse settings (changes in discourse perspectives, indirect vs. direct styles, etc.).  To this end, the corpus has been annotated automatically and provides information as phone labels, phone boundaries, syllables, words or morpho-syntactic tagging. Moreover, a significant part of the corpus has also been annotated manually to encode direct/indirect speech and emotional information.

Excerpts from the audiobooks

Example 1 (novel):
Example 2 (fable):
Example 3(poem):

Synthesized examples

Those samples are synthesized using the full corpus and our unit selection system.

Short examples:

Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3:

Long example from a tale:

Example 1: