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Does anyone know of a pronouciation dictionary that can be used for British English. The only British English Pronounciation Dictionary that I've found is BEEP, which cannot be used commercially.
Can the CMU dictionary be adapted for British English?
<Rant>Commercially-friendly software libraries reduce market entry barrier for startups. If Larry Page and Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg had to buy or create all the utils they needed there would no Google or Facebook, and that might not be a good thing ;-) </Rant>
--- (Edited on 1/4/2013 12:09 pm [GMT-0600] by Olumide) ---
My company (Cantab Research) can supply one to you.
I'm also the author of BEEP. Over the years I did try to negotiate a more suitable licence but it proved impossible.
Tony
--
Dr Tony Robinson
CEO Cantab Research Ltd
Phone +44(0)1223 794497
--- (Edited on 4-January-2013 6:31 pm [GMT+0000] by TonyR) ---
May I ask why the copyright holders of BEEP aren't willing to make it available commercially?
Expecting everyone to prepare their own phonetic dictionary is such a massive undertaking that is impossible for most people -- slightly akin to expecting everyone to write their own operating system and programming language compiler.
--- (Edited on 1/4/2013 4:14 pm [GMT-0600] by Olumide) ---
For both the CUVOALD and MRC portions it was because this was the terms on which the respective researchers had recieved it, so they had no rights to change those terms nor any incentive to do so. The lawyers/management that released the data for research only had done their negotiaton on that basis and a commercial release would mean starting again.
Remember, this was 1994. There wern't many of us doing large vocabulary speech recognition at the time and to do so meant spending about as much on hardware as salaries. I only started comp.speech in late 1992, before that there was no world wide forum/archive for speech discussions/code/data. The business of a dictionary publisher was paper books, Mosaic was only one year old, FTP was the main means of file sharing and Linux 1.0.0 was released in 1994.
I should have included the original licences but I didn't. I think we are lucky that BEEP has been available for nearly 20 years.
Tony
--
Dr Tony Robinson
CEO Cantab Research Ltd
Phone +44(0)1223 794497
--- (Edited on 5-January-2013 7:30 am [GMT+0000] by TonyR) ---