The ARCTIC prompts come from old novels, and were selected under constraints described in the technical report, which means that they don’t give very good coverage of common short phrases, such as greetings. You can therefore supplement the ARCTIC script with some of your own material.
If you are able to code, then you can skip this section and move on to the next section which covers automatic text selection in which you will write your own algorithm to select the text to record.
If you can’t code, then you can add some prompts to cover the following:
- 5 sentences which include your name in different contexts (e.g., phrase-initial and phrase final);
- 10 short frequently-used set-phrases such as “Hello.”, “Hi.”, “How are you?”, “Goodbye.” and so on;
- about 50 sentences aimed to cover a very small limited domain.
Choose a limited domain where you can include all the words in the vocabulary items several times each (in different contexts and positions) within just 50 sentences, but from which you are able to synthesise a much larger range of new sentences. For example:
- Times and dates.
- Street addresses, with a very small set of street names (e.g., North Street, North Avenue, West Street, …) and a few numbers.
Invent your own domain, and don’t use one of those examples! It’s fine to artificially restrict the vocabulary and types of sentences: it’s just an exercise, after all.
After you design your additional material, prepare a new file in the same format as utts.data, containing your sentences – this file will be used by the SpeechRecorder tool to record those sentences. Number the sentences in a meaningful way, with your name and a unique number, in a similar way to the main scripts. You do not need to include the ARCTIC script: that is already loaded into SpeechRecorder. In addition, you need to add your new sentences to the end of the utts.data file.
Important: use a plain text editor (such as Aquamacs) to make those files – you must avoid non-ASCII characters.