University of Tasmania, Australia

The AusTalk project is designed to create the first large auditory-visual database of spoken Australian English. One thousand volunteer Australians in all states and territories are lending their voices to this project, in recording centres located in 17 centres across the country, linked to a dozen participating Australian universities. The resulting database will support the development of speech technology applications, from automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis, to hearing prostheses, to a range of security and forensic applications. It will also provide an archive of current spoken Australian English. AusTalk is funded by an ARC LIEF grant, as well as contributions from most of the participating universities. The project leader, Professor Denis Burnham, is based at the University of Western Sydney, and the Tasmanian recording centre, based at the UTAS School of Psychology on the Hobart campus, is being co-ordinated by Dr Nenagh Kemp.

In Hobart, 48 Tasmanians are visiting the AusTalk recording centre in the School of Psychology to participate in three one-hour recording sessions with research assistant Rosie Maunder. Participants are recorded reading some words and sentences, having a conversation, and playing a game with another participant. Their voices will be added to those of others being recorded over the next months around the country. The end result will be a large, rich audio-visual database representing the variety of ways of talking that make up the contemporary Australian accent, based on the speech of 1000 adults who have completed all their schooling in Australia.  

The 35 researchers involved in AusTalk represent a range of disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, speech science, and computing. All these researchers bring different and valuable areas of expertise to the project, and all will be using the resulting data in different ways. As well as creating a permanent record of Australian speech, the data collected will be used to help a range of develop speech technology applications that will improve the communication and the indeed the lives of many Australians.

AusTalk website

Project Leaders (External)

Members (External)

UTAS recording co-ordinator: Dr Nenagh Kemp nenagh.kemp@utas.edu.au

Project co-ordinator (University of Western Sydney): Dr Dominique Estival