The Switchboard-1 Telephone Speech Corpus (LDC97S62) consists of approximately 260 hours of speech and was originally collected by Texas Instruments in 1990-1, under DARPA sponsorship. The first release of the corpus was published by NIST and distributed by the LDC in 1992-3.
Switchboard is a collection of about 2,400 two-sided telephone conversations among 543 speakers (302 male, 241 female) from all areas of the United States. A computer-driven robot operator system handled the calls, giving the caller appropriate recorded prompts, selecting and dialing another person (the callee) to take part in a conversation, introducing a topic for discussion and recording the speech from the two subjects into separate channels until the conversation was finished. About 70 topics were provided, of which about 50 were used frequently. Selection of topics and callees was constrained so that: (1) no two speakers would converse together more than once and (2) no one spoke more than once on a given topic.
