A blueprint for a comprehensive Australian English auditory-visual speech corpus

Large auditory-visual speech corpora are the grist of modern research in speech science, but no such corpus exists for Australian English. This is unfortunate, for speech science is the brains behind speech technology and applications such as Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speaker recognition and forensic identification, talking heads, and hearing prostheses. Advances in these research areas in Australia require a large corpus of Australian English. Here we describe a blueprint for building the Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC), a corpus of over 1,100 speakers from all over Australia, urban and rural; speakers of non-indigenous, indigenous, ethnocultural, and disordered forms of Australian English; each sampled on three occasions in a range of speech tasks designed by the researchers who would be using the corpus.