  This paper introduces the Voices Obscured In Complex Environmental Settings
(VOICES) corpus, a freely available dataset under Creative Commons BY 4.0. This
dataset will promote speech and signal processing research of speech recorded
by far-field microphones in noisy room conditions. Publicly available speech
corpora are mostly composed of isolated speech at close-range microphony. A
typical approach to better represent realistic scenarios, is to convolve clean
speech with noise and simulated room response for model training. Despite these
efforts, model performance degrades when tested against uncurated speech in
natural conditions. For this corpus, audio was recorded in furnished rooms with
background noise played in conjunction with foreground speech selected from the
LibriSpeech corpus. Multiple sessions were recorded in each room to accommodate
for all foreground speech-background noise combinations. Audio was recorded
using twelve microphones placed throughout the room, resulting in 120 hours of
audio per microphone. This work is a multi-organizational effort led by SRI
International and Lab41 with the intent to push forward state-of-the-art
distant microphone approaches in signal processing and speech recognition.
