Van Niekerk, Daniel R.van Heerden, CharlKleynhans, NeilKjartansson, OddurJansche, MartinHa, LinneDavel, Marelie H.2018-02-272018-02-272017Daniel Rudolph van Niekerk, Charl van Heerden, Marelie Davel, Neil Kleynhans, Oddur Kjartansson, Martin Jansche and Linne Ha, “Rapid development of TTS corpora for four South African languages”, in Proc. Interspeech, pp 2178-2182, Stockholm, Sweden, 2017. [http://engineering.nwu.ac.za/multilingual-speech-technologies-must/publications]http://hdl.handle.net/10394/26444http://www.demitasse.co.za/~demitasse/pubs/poster_is2017.pdfThis paper describes the development of text-to-speech corpora for four South African languages. The approach followed investigated the possibility of using low-cost methods including informal recording environments and untrained volunteer speakers. This objective and the additional future goal of expanding the corpus to increase coverage of South Africa’s 11 official languages necessitated experimenting with multi-speaker and code-switched data. The process and relevant observations are detailed throughout. The latest version of the corpora are available for download under an open-source license and will likely see further development and refinement in future. Index Terms: text-to-speech corpus, under-resourced languagesenTTS corporamulti-speaker and code-switched dataunder-resourced languagesPresentation