they're a collection of sentences designed to have a representative set of english sounds, while also being sensical. they've been used in linguistics and in testing phones and voice over ip. here's some examples:
my first job in natural language processing was that I was annotating the prosody of spoken English. The process occasionally included reoccurring training sentences, to make sure we remembered how to use some of the rarer labels.
The training sentence that will stick in my head forever is "Oh don't nuzzle me, you marmalade-nose!", spoken very emphatically but with no expectation of a response, probably to a dog
i was curious if i could find that sentence in the wild and yeah i found this! http://www.speechlab.csi.cuny.edu/uploads/1/4/5/9/14591628/prosody_week4_handout.pdf
Oh hey thats what i used for voice training ! I wrote a little script for enso that spat them out at random because my housemates started getting a little confused why i was saying the vowels and days of the week and the quick brown fox phrase multiple times an hour sometimes. (and yet they didnt realise that my voice was slowly changing across the entire year, yay for boiling the frog !)
