As part of a joint research project with the Institute for Signal and Information Processing at MSU, Dragon Systems, Inc., a world leader in speech recognition technology conducted a data collection in Mississippi State University starting from February 21 till February 25. The goal of this project was to collect southern accented data. Speech collection is one of the essential and efficient way to develop proper interface between the people and the machines. The recognizers that have been developed so far failed badly in recognizing voices of speakers with southern accents. This was the cause of lack of sufficient speakers with southern accents in the database. So in order to train the recognizer to perform effectively even with speakers with southern accent this speech collection was conducted. Speaker were selected according to the following criteria

native speakers of US English with a definitive local accent
ability to read text from a laptop computer screen
comfortable using a PC and mouse while wearing a headset
willing to have their speech recorded for over two hours
aged between 18 and 65.

The minimum time commitment was 2 hours and 15 minutes at a hourly rate of $10. Participants were also allowed to elect to receive a free copy of Dragon's Naturally Speaking - Preferred Edition (a $100 value).

Documentation:

Announcements: The announcement that was made to attract the native speakers.
Schedule: Complete schedule of speakers that took part in the project.
Data: The complete data that was collected.

The data was collected from 23 speakers both male and female of all age groups ranging from 18 to 56. The recording was held at Herbert Hall.
The schedule for the recording sessions was as follows

TIMINGS	Feb 21	Feb 22	Feb 23	Feb 24	Feb 25
9 AM		Room A	Room A	Room A	Room A
10 AM		Room B	Room B	Room B	Room B
11:45 AM	Room A	Room A	Room A	Room A	Room A
12:45 PM	Room B	Room B	Room B	Room B
2:30 PM	Room A	Room A	Room A	Room A
3:30 PM	Room B	Room B	Room B	Room B