Note: this part of the exercise will require some basic coding skills (e.g., in Python).
Instead of, or as well as, adding a small set of handcrafted sentences from a limited domain, you can implement a simple text-selection algorithm and use that to select your additional material.
The most advanced version of this is to select an additional set that is the same size (in terms of recorded speech) as the ARCTIC ‘A’ set. You can then build voices from ARTIC ‘A’ or from your material, and compare them in a listening test.
Remember that you’ll also need to record this material in the studio! Make sure to record under exactly the same conditions (same studio, same microphone, etc) in all of your recording sessions, so that you have the option of combining the data to build a single voice.
Some ideas to get you started:
- You could try to exactly replicate the ARCTIC text selection algorithm, or try your own ideas.
- You could use much more up-to-date source text, instead of old novels.
- If you select from limited domain source text, then you should be able to build a really good domain-specific voice. One challenge will be finding a suitably large body of such text (e.g., scrape the web for sports reports).