SPEECON, launched in February 2000,mobile communication is a project focusing on collecting linguistic data for speech recogniser training. SPEECON is funded as a shared-cost project under Human Language Technologies (HLT), which is part of the European Commission's Information Societies Technologies (IST) Programme. The project is put into action by an industrial consortium lead by Siemenskitchen appliances and promotes the development of voice controlled consumer applications (CE) such as television sets,internet browsing video recorders, mobile phones, palmtop computers, car navigation kits or even microwave ovens and toasters. Instead of operating these devices manually,television and VCR all users of future CE applications have to do is simply talk to their equipment. Like other IST projects supported by the EU,car navigation SPEECON is, in the Commission's own words, meant to "improve the functionality, usability and acceptability of future information products and services to enable linguistic and cultural diversity". SPEECON follows these lines by providing linguistice-commerce data and technological know-how that will enable companies to develop speech-driven applications in the consumer electronics domain.digital media During the lifetime of the project, originally scheduled to last two years, partners will collect speech data for 18 languages or dialectal zones, including most of the languages spoken in the EU. It devotes special attention to the environment of the recordings,remote controls which are, like the typical surroundings of CE applications, at home, in the office, in public places or in moving vehicles.

Keywords
speech processing, speech recognition, speech corpora, recording, annotation, validation