Some weeks ago there was a question on the Kaldi's mailing list about the possibility of creating a Kaldi recipe using VoxForge's data. For those not familiar with it, VoxForge is a project, which has the goal of collecting speech data for various languages, that can be used for training acoustic models for automatic speech recognition. The project is founded and maintained, to the best of my knowledge, by Ken MacLean and thrives thanks to the generous contributions of great number of volunteers, who record sample utterances using the Java applet available on the website, or submit pre-recorded data. As far as I know this is the largest body of free(in both of the usual senses of the word) speech data, readily available for acoustic model training. It seemed like a good idea to develop a Kaldi recipe, that can be used by people who want to try the toolkit, but don't have access to the commercial corpora. My previous recipe, based on freely available features for a subset of RM data can be also used for that purpose, but it has somewhat limited functionality. This post describes the data preparation steps, specific to VoxForge's data.
