New Finnish and Swedish speech dataset could accelerate AI voice tech in Europe
Researchers have released Nord-Parl-TTS, a large open-source speech dataset for Finnish and Swedish drawn from parliamentary recordings. The 5,900+ hours of high-quality audio addresses a critical bottleneck: most AI voice technology is trained on English and Mandarin, leaving smaller language markets underserved and companies dependent on proprietary solutions.
Originaltitel: Nord-Parl-TTS: Finnish and Swedish TTS Dataset from Parliament Speech
Text-to-speech (TTS) development is limited by scarcity of high-quality, publicly available speech data for most languages outside a few high-resource languages. We present Nord-Parl-TTS, an open TTS dataset for Finnish and Swedish based on speech found in the wild. Using recordings of Nordic parliamentary proceedings, we extract 900 hours of Finnish and 5090 hours of Swedish speech suitable for TTS training. The dataset is built using an adapted version of the Emilia data processing pipeline and includes unified evaluation sets to support model development and benchmarking. By offering open, large-scale data for Finnish and Swedish, Nord-Parl-TTS narrows the resource gap in TTS between high- and lower-resourced languages.