Spoken Wikipedia Corpora
by University of Bielefeld
Long-form Wikipedia audiobook recordings in English / German / Dutch — ~1000h.
TL;DR
Long-form Wikipedia audiobook recordings in English / German / Dutch — ~1000h.
Best for long-form ASR with article-level context; alignment research. Pricing: free.
Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
Web
What it is
Spoken Wikipedia Corpora (SWC) collects volunteer-read Wikipedia articles in English (~395h), German (~386h), Dutch (~165h). All aligned at sentence + word level. License: CC BY-SA.
Best for: Long-form ASR with article-level context; alignment research.
Watch out for: CC BY-SA (Wikipedia text + audio) · variable speaker count per article. Cite: Köhn et al., LREC 2016.
Watch out for: CC BY-SA (Wikipedia text + audio) · variable speaker count per article. Cite: Köhn et al., LREC 2016.
Install / use
https://nats.gitlab.io/swc/
Features
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | Yes |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 3 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Spoken Wikipedia Corpora vs Whipscribe
| Feature | Spoken Wikipedia Corpora | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | No | Yes |
| Word timestamps | Yes | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 3 | 99 |
| Platforms | Web | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to Spoken Wikipedia Corpora
Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.