Daylong acoustic recordings of family and child speech using the HomeBank database

HomeBank (https://homebank.talkbank.org/) is an online database of multi-hour, naturalistic audio recordings of child and family everyday experiences. Corpora in the database include (1) raw audio recordings; (2) corpus metadata including for example social details, standardized test scores, disability reports and status, family data such as number and quantity of siblings, orthographic transcriptions, output of diarization or automatic-speech recognition processing; and (3) tools for analyzing the data (https://github.com/homebankcode/) in a variety of domains. There are currently over a dozen corpora representing over 1100 multi-hour (often daylong) audio recordings. Use of the database is increasing in the scientific community, including researchers of speech, language, computer science, digital signal processing, automatic speech recognition, health sciences, and human development. The utility and extensibility of HomeBank is demonstrated in this talk with several current and ongoing projects that make critical use of the data. We discuss diarization and automatic speech processing techniques, speech and language use in pre-industrial families and groups, early perception and processing in infants, family speech and language dynamics in families of children with disorders, and database management. We are actively soliciting both users and contributors to the database.