Slightly OT, but I was really intrigued to read about the "Switchboard" Corpus (http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/readme_files/switchboard.readme.html http://www

Slightly OT, but I was really intrigued to read about the "Switchboard" Corpus (http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/readme_files/switchboard.readme.html http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/readme_files/switchboard.re...), especially given they were from audio recordings. It seems, unfortunately, that the recordings aren't publicly available, although archive.org seems to have small sample of the transcripts: http://www.archive.org/details/SwitchboardCorpusSample http://www.archive.org/details/SwitchboardCorpusSample One particularly interesting section of the above readme was the section on technical issues (http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/readme_files/switchboard.readme.html#technical http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/readme_files/switchboard.re...) including this example: "ii.) The third problem was small changes in synchrony between A and B, due to a pseudorandom dropping of 2 ms chunks of data on either side. Over the course of a 10 minute conversation, these could accumulate to a differential of 30 or 40 msec between sides--enough to change a cross-channel echo from inaudible to audible, for example, or from barely audible to very noticeable, for a human listener. When this bug was finally run down, it turned out to be a piece of code in the utility which extracts conversations ('messages') from the Robotoperator message master file. The code performed a check at each data block boundary to see if the first two bytes had the values 'FF FF'; if so, these were interpreted as header information, and the 16 bytes beginning with "FF FF" were discarded as not part of the speech data. This code was a relic from an earlier version of the Robotoperator which did not deal with mu-law values, and thus never encountered FF in data. In mu-law data, FF is one of two ways of representing zero signal level ('minus zero'). The offending lines of code were removed and the problem ceased."