KSU speech database: Text selection, recording and verification

King Saud University speech database (KSU-DB) is a very rich speech database of Arabic language. Its richness is in many dimensions. It has more than three hundred speakers of both genders. The speakers are Arabs and non-Arabs belonging to twenty-nine different nationalities. The database has different types of text such as isolated words, digits, phonetically rich words and sentences, phonetically balanced sentences, paragraphs, and answers to questions. The KSU-DB was recorded in three different locations, the first is an office that represents a normal environment with low noise. The second and third locations are cafeteria and soundproof room representing noisy and quiet environments, respectively. The database has different channels of recordings, mobile, medium and high quality microphones connected to recording devices of different qualities. To track the inter-session variations of the speakers, the database was recorded in three sessions with a gap of about six weeks. Though the database main goal is for speaker recognition research, nonetheless, we made it very rich so that it can be used in many speech-processing researches. A team of native Arabs verified the database manually as well as automatically.