Speechcake: Version Control for Speech Corpora

While the audio recordings of a corpus represent the ground truth, transcriptions are – in the case of manual annotations – subject to human error, and subject to changes related to technology improvements underpinning automated annotation methods. In order to facilitate the dynamic extension of speech corpora, we introduce Speechcake, a tool for centralized version control for speech corpora, enabling the automatic check-in and merging of annotations. It considers typical workflows of phoneticians, linguists and speech technologists, and enables the development of dynamic, collaborative, and perpetually-improving speech corpora.