Sound Privacy: A Conversational Speech Corpus for Quantifying the Experience of Privacy

With the growing popularity of social networks, cloud services and online applications, people are becoming concerned about the way companies store their data and the ways in which the data can be applied. Privacy with devices and services operated by the voice are of particular interest. To enable studies in privacy, this paper presents a database which quantifies the experience of privacy users have in spoken communication. We focus on the effect of the acoustic environment on that perception of privacy. Speech signals are recorded in scenarios simulating real-life situations, where the acoustic environment has an effect on the experience of privacy. The acoustic data is complemented with measures of the speakers’ experience of privacy, recorded using a questionnaire. The presented corpus enables studies in how acoustic environments affect peoples’ experience of privacy, which in turn, can be used to develop speech operated applications which are respectful of their right to privacy.