The database will help researchers develop technology and automatic speech recognition systems to support education and speech therapy for Australian children with speech problems. 

 A member of the AusKidTalk project, Dr Beena Ahmed said:, “There are only 14 databases of children's speech in the world that can be accessed by researchers, but none of them have recorded Australian voices”.

 

AusKidTalk wants to record the voices of 750 children born and educated in Australia, by June 2021 and has already recorded around 60 participants' voices in 2020.

AusKidTalk is a joint university project between the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, University of Western Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Melbourne. Specialists working on the project include: engineers, linguists, psychologists, phoneticians and speech pathologists.