The People's Speech
The People's Speech is MLCommons' answer to a practical problem: most large speech datasets carry licences that make commercial use awkward. It gathers more than 30,000 hours of English audio from openly licensed sources and pairs it with transcripts, giving teams a big, legally usable corpus for training automatic speech recognition (ASR, turning spoken audio into text).
Licensing varies by subset: some parts are CC BY 4.0 and others are CC BY-SA 4.0. Both permit commercial use, but the ShareAlike (SA) portions require that derivative databases carry the same licence, so check which subset you are using before you build on it. The dataset is distributed through HuggingFace, which makes it straightforward to stream or download.
Related sources
LibriSpeech
A collection of 1,000 hours of read English speech, released under CC BY 4.0 and stored using the open-source FLAC audio encoder. Labels are aligned at the sentence level. Derived from LibriVox public domain audiobooks, it is the standard benchmark for English automatic speech recognition.
LJ Speech
An open dataset of 13,100 short audio clips of a single speaker reading passages from seven non-fiction books. Every clip is transcribed and clips run from 1 to 10 seconds. Released into the public domain, it is the standard single-speaker text-to-speech benchmark.
Mozilla Common Voice
A crowdsourced speech platform from Mozilla that releases datasets under the CC0 licence. Volunteers read sentences aloud and other community members validate each recording. As of release 19.0 it holds 32,584 hours of speech across 131 languages, making it one of the largest openly licensed voice datasets available.
OpenSLR
Open Speech and Language Resources, a hosting site for speech and language datasets, software, and models. It is the home of LibriSpeech and dozens of other language-specific speech corpora, making it a central catalogue for finding openly available voice data.