In this paper we outline the German speech data collection for the SmartWeb project, which is fundedby the German Ministry of Science and Education. We focus on the SmartWeb Handheld Corpus (SHC), which has been collected by the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) at the Phonetic Institute (IPSK) of Munich University. Signals of SHC are being recorded in real-life environments(indoor and outdoor) with real background noise as well as real transmission line errors. We developed a new elicitation method and recording technique, calledsituational prompting, which facilitates collecting realistic dialogue speech data in a cost efficient way. We can show that almost realistic speech queries to a dialogue system issued over a mobile PDA or smart phonecan be collected very efficiently using an automatic speech server. We describe the technical and linguistic features of the resulting speech corpus, which will bepublicly available at BAS or ELDA.

Three advanced German speech corpora have been collected during theGerman SmartWeb project. One of them, the SmartWeb MotorbikeCorpus (SMC) is described in this paper. As with all SmartWeb speech corpora SMC is designed for a dialogue system dealing with open domains. The corpus is recorded under the special circumstances of a motorbike ride and contains utterances of the driver related to information retrieval from various sources and different topics. Audio tracks show characteristic noise from the engine and surrounding traffic as well as drop outs caused by the transmission over Bluetooth and the UMTS mobile network. We discuss the problems of the technical setup and the fully automatic evocation of natural-spoken queries by means of dialogue-like sequences.