TIMIT

by LDC / NIST / Texas Instruments + MIT

Phonetically-balanced 5h read-speech corpus from 1986 — phoneme recognition benchmark.

TL;DR

Phonetically-balanced 5h read-speech corpus from 1986 — phoneme recognition benchmark.

Best for phoneme-level recognition baselines; teaching ASR fundamentals. Pricing: paid.

Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
paid
Platforms
LDC

What it is

TIMIT (LDC93S1) is the foundational phonetically-balanced read-speech corpus — 630 speakers across 8 US dialect regions, phone-aligned at 16 kHz. Still the standard for phoneme recognition pedagogy. LDC paid.

Best for: Phoneme-level recognition baselines; teaching ASR fundamentals.
Watch out for: LDC license · paid · 630 speakers from 8 dialect regions · 6300 utterances · phoneme-aligned. Cite: Garofolo et al., 1993.

Install / use

https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC93S1  # LDC membership

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsYes
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supported1
HIPAA eligibleNo

TIMIT vs Whipscribe

FeatureTIMITWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingpaidfree beta
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsYesYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages199
PlatformsLDCWeb, API, MCP

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