LJ Speech

by Keith Ito

24h single-speaker English audiobook corpus — the canonical TTS baseline.

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TL;DR

Best for single-speaker neural TTS baselines (Tacotron, FastSpeech, VITS, etc.). Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
Web, HuggingFace

What it is

LJ Speech is 24 hours of single-speaker English read speech from public-domain audiobooks. Every modern English TTS paper trains on it. Public domain.

Best for: Single-speaker neural TTS baselines (Tacotron, FastSpeech, VITS, etc.).
Watch out for: Public domain (LibriVox / pre-1923 books) · 24h · single female speaker. Cite: Ito & Johnson, 2017.

Install / use

from datasets import load_dataset; ds = load_dataset('keithito/lj_speech')

Features

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

LJ Speech vs Whipscribe

FeatureLJ SpeechWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfree$4–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · 60 min free on signup
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsNoYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages199
PlatformsWeb, HuggingFaceWeb, API, MCP

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