Handling Accented Characters in Azure Custom Speech English Datasets

Hi Julien S,

I'm glad that you were able to resolve your issue and thank you for posting your solution so that others experiencing the same thing can easily reference this! Since the Microsoft Q&A community has a policy that "The question author cannot accept their own answer. They can only accept answers by others ", I'll repost your solution in case you'd like to accept the answer.

Issue:
When adding a dataset to Azure Custom Speech in English, any lines containing accented characters (e.g., Montréal) are rejected. Is it possible to create an English dataset in Azure Custom Speech that includes such special characters? This issue is critical for users who need to process multilingual data or names with accents. Understanding how to handle these characters can significantly improve the usability and accuracy of speech recognition models. Any insights or solutions to this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Solution:
I discovered my mistake: I used UTF-8 as the data encoding, but it requires UTF-8 BOM. Everything is working perfectly now.

If I missed anything please let me know and I'd be happy to add it to my answer, or feel free to comment below with any additional information.

Hope this helps. Do let us know if you have any further queries.

If this answers your query, do click Accept Answer and Yes for was this answer helpful. And, if you have any further query do let us know.