Telephone data collection using the World Wide Web

Over the past year our group has begun development of telephone-based speech understanding capability for our GALAXY conversational system. An important part of this process has been the collection of telephone speech which was used for training and evaluation. In the first phase of data collection our goal was to collect read speech from a wide variety of talkers, telephone handsets, and noise/channel conditions. In the second phase of data collection our additional goal was to collect spontaneous telephone speech from subjects actually using the system. In order to maximize variation in telephone conditions, as well as ease of use for subjects, the data collection software was designed to telephone subjects at their specified phone numbers around North America. Subjects initiate the data collection session by submitting an electronic form accessible by a WWW browser. For read speech collection, a set of prompts is automatically generated for the subject. This paper describes the design of the data collection system we are using for these purposes. To date we have collected over 9,000 utterances from over 270 subjects.