The description of a speech database collected over the telephone by means of an automatic calling system is described. Particular care has been posed in the geographical coverage of the speakers.

Both task-dependent and task-independent material has been collected, in order to build respectively a recognition system for connected digits and to provide a starting point for vocabulary-independent systems.

All the speech material has been manually transcribed, including spontaneous speech phenomena (breaths, coughs, laughs, hesitations) and acoustically relevant noises.