Audio and Prompts Discussions

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I have question about audio samples
User: kmaclean
Date: 6/22/2009 12:10 pm
Views: 5689
Rating: 5

Philippe Samson had the following question:

Hi,
I have a few questions for you guys. First, I would be interested to buy (and pay for the shipment) a pack of DVDs containing all your original english audio files. I have some ideas concerning the field of speech synthesis, and it would require a lot of audio samples. This is for the purpose of training a few AI powered mechanisms of my own.
I am asking for those DVDs because my internet speed is too slow for efficient mass downloading, and I don't want to jam your bandwith while sucking every single audio file from your directory. Is that possible?

Second, I am not a GPL license savy, so I want to ask: is using your audio samples for training neural networks and then using those networks for a commercial application legal?
I am considering selling the software I would eventually develop but I don't know if I can. I would use the material for the software developement only (no audio sample would be directly or indirectly stored within the software ressources). If I can't, I will do the whole thing open-source. If, for any reason, using the material the way I described is legal but bad, please tell me.

Thank you!

Philippe Samson, amateur AI hobbyist

--- (Edited on 6/22/2009 1:10 pm [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

Re: I have question about audio samples
User: kmaclean
Date: 6/22/2009 12:11 pm
Views: 55
Rating: 3

My reply:

Hi Phillipe,

> I have a few questions for you guys. First, I would be interested to buy
> (and pay for the shipment) a pack of DVDs containing all your original
> english audio files.
Sorry, I don't have time to burn DVDs.

The VoxForge Repostory is separate from the VoxForge website, and
downloading from there does not impact the front-end website, so it is
OK to download the entire corpus from the repository (just select the
16khz-16bit directory if you want all the audio in a 'normalized'
format) .
> Second, I am not a GPL license savy, so I want to ask: is using your audio
> samples for training neural networks and then using those networks for a
> commercial application legal?
I really don't know for sure, but I have been taking a conservative
view of Copyright, and have assumed that anything that is derived from
the original corpus (like acoustic models, neural networks, etc.) is a
derivative work, and therefore must abide by the GPL.

Ken

--- (Edited on 6/22/2009 1:11 pm [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

Re: I have question about audio samples
User: kmaclean
Date: 6/22/2009 12:18 pm
Views: 2204
Rating: 4

Hi Philippe,

One thing to note, if you are using wget (or something like that), to
download the corpus, make sure you don't follow the links off the
voxforge repository.

The VoxForge logo is a link to the VoxForge front-end website, and
this can cause problems on the VoxForge website if you are not careful
with your wget command,

thanks,

Ken

--- (Edited on 6/22/2009 1:18 pm [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

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