Wanted: Voice samples in English with Singaporean accent

At least 1,000 people to be recruited to provide samples, which will be added to database to train chatbots

OCBC Bank, a front runner in voice-activated chatbot use in the banking sector here, tested the national corpus on its home and renovations loan chatbot in 2018. The bank plans to expand the corpus' use across all its voice-activated chatbots.
OCBC Bank, a front runner in voice-activated chatbot use in the banking sector here, tested the national corpus on its home and renovations loan chatbot in 2018. The bank plans to expand the corpus' use across all its voice-activated chatbots. PHOTO: OCBC BANK
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Wanted: Voice samples in English with a Singaporean accent, including the occasional use of Malay, Mandarin and Tamil words.

At least 1,000 people here will be recruited to provide these samples, which will be added to a national corpus of local speech for training artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbots for daily use.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on February 08, 2020, with the headline Wanted: Voice samples in English with Singaporean accent. Subscribe