The TIMIT corpus of read speech has been designed to provide speech data for the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge and for the development and evaluation of automatic speech recognition systems.  TIMIT has resulted from the joint efforts of several sites under sponsorship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - Information Science and Technology Office (DARPA-ISTO).  Text corpus design was a joint effort among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and Texas Instruments (TI).  The speech was recorded at TI, transcribed at MIT, and has been maintained, verified, and prepared for CD-ROM production by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

TIMIT contains phonetically balanced sentences read by 630 speakers (of which 70%were male) from eight major dialects of American English.  TIMIT is devided into a training and testing division, in which no sentence or speaker appears in both the training and test set. The training set consists of 3,696 utterances, the test set of 1,344 utterances. The files are available in  The TIMIT database was hand-segmented and hand-labeled on the word level and on the phone level using 59 Arpabet symbols.