First experiences of the German speechdat-car database collection in mobile environments

In SpeechDat-Car, speech databases for speech driven devices and services for mobile environments are collected for nine European languages. The German SpeechDat-Car installation was the first fully equipped platform within the project. It has served as a testbed for the recording software for the entire project, and as an opportunity to perform technical and organizational feasibility tests for the German data collection. The main results are: i) drivers feel comfortable with the prompts displayed on an LCD screen attached to the dashboard, ii) the audio-visual mode of prompting allowed the elicitation of speech even under difficult traffic conditions, and iii) the original synchronization protocol could be made more efficient by 20%, so that the 129 items of one recording session can now be recorded in 45-50 minutes.