IndicSpeech: Text-to-Speech Corpus for Indian Languages

India is a country where several tens of languages are spoken by over a billion strong population. Text-to-speech systems for such languages will thus be extremely beneficial for wide-spread content creation and accessibility. Despite this, the current TTS systems for even the most popular Indian languages fall short of the contemporary state-of-the-art systems for English, Chinese, etc. We believe that one of the major reasons for this is the lack of large, publicly available text-to-speech corpora in these languages that are suitable for training neural text-to-speech systems. To mitigate this, we release a 24 hour text-to-speech corpus for 3 major Indian languages namely Hindi, Malayalam and Bengali. In this work, we also train a state-of-the-art TTS system for each of these languages and report their performances. The collected corpus, code, and trained models are made publicly available.