European speech databases for telephone applications

The SpeechDat project aims to produce speech databases for all official languages of the European Union and some major dialectal variants and minority languages resulting in 28 speech databases. They will be recorded over fixed and mobile telephone networks. This will provide a realistic basis for training and assessment of both isolated and continuous-speech utterances, employing whole-word or subword approaches, and thus can be used for developing voice driven teleservices including speaker verification. The specification of the databases has been developed jointly, and is essentially the same for each language to facilitate dissemination and use. There will be a controlled variation among the speakers concerning sex, age, dialect, environment of call, etc. The validation of all databases will be carried out centrally. The SpeechDat databases will be transferred to ELRA for distribution. The next databases to be recorded will cover East European languages.