Speak: A Toolkit Using Amazon Mechanical Turk to Collect and Validate Speech Audio Recordings

Abstract

We present Speak, a toolkit that allows researchers to crowdsource speech audio recordings using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Speak allows MTurk workers to submit speech recordings in response to a task prompt and stimulus (e.g. image, text excerpt, audio file) defined by researchers, a functionality that is not natively offered by MTurk at the time of writing this paper. Importantly, the toolkit employs numerous measures to ensure that speech recordings collected are of adequate quality, in order to avoid accepting unusable data and prevent abuse/fraud. Speak has demonstrated utility, having collected over 600,000 recordings to date. The toolkit is open-source and available for download.

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