Play SPH files in your browser
The format of the speech corpora behind decades of speech recognition research. Play an SPH right here. Nothing leaves your device.
Or drop it anywhere on this page
What you'll see
Your sound starts playing the moment it opens, its whole waveform across your screen.
- Its whole waveform • Press or drag to jump
- Back and ahead 10 seconds • Half, 1.5× or double speed
- Show tags • Title, artist, album and cover
- Export • Save as MP3 or WAV
About SPH
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology made SPHERE in the early 1990s for the recordings it gathered to test speech recognition. TIMIT, Switchboard and many Linguistic Data Consortium corpora come as .sph files.
An SPH file starts with a 1 KB text header naming the sample rate, the channels, the speaker and more, then the samples, in PCM or mu-law.
Filepeek decodes it with FFmpeg inside your browser, with its waveform, and Export saves a WAV for any audio tool.
NIST SPHERE
.sph
Format
- MIME type
- application/octet-stream
- Made by
- NIST
Inside the file
- Audio
- PCM or mu-law
- Header
- 1 KB of text
- Sample rate
- Usually 8 or 16 kHz
- Made for
- Speech research
Opens in every browser
No browser plays SPH by itself. Filepeek decodes it with FFmpeg in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari.
- YouChromePlays through Filepeek
- YouEdgePlays through Filepeek
- YouFirefoxPlays through Filepeek
- YouSafariPlays through Filepeek
Questions
How do I listen to an SPH file?
Drop it on this page or press Peek an SPH. It plays right away.
Can I convert SPH to WAV?
Yes. Choose Export, then Save as WAV.
Why doesn't one of my SPH files play?
Some corpora packed their samples with Shorten inside the SPHERE file, which needs NIST's own tools.
Is my recording uploaded?
No. The recording opens inside your browser and never leaves your device.