The People's Speech: A Large-Scale Diverse English Speech Recognition Dataset for Commercial Usage
This provides a free, commercially usable dataset for speech recognition, addressing data scarcity and legal barriers, though it is incremental in building on existing data collection methods.
The authors tackled the need for a large-scale, freely available speech recognition dataset by creating The People's Speech, a 30,000-hour English dataset, and achieved a 9.98% word error rate on the Librispeech test-clean set.
The People's Speech is a free-to-download 30,000-hour and growing supervised conversational English speech recognition dataset licensed for academic and commercial usage under CC-BY-SA (with a CC-BY subset). The data is collected via searching the Internet for appropriately licensed audio data with existing transcriptions. We describe our data collection methodology and release our data collection system under the Apache 2.0 license. We show that a model trained on this dataset achieves a 9.98% word error rate on Librispeech's test-clean test set.Finally, we discuss the legal and ethical issues surrounding the creation of a sizable machine learning corpora and plans for continued maintenance of the project under MLCommons's sponsorship.