Have you considered taking donations, and then using that to fund voice samples through amazon's Mechanical Turk system. I figure that a reasonable low wage of £3(sorry i'm in the uk, i don't know what a reasonable low wage is in the US) per hour of audio, would get interest.

I guess it depends on whether there's enough interest for enough donations to be made to fund a significant job on mechanical turk.

--- (Edited on 4/18/2008 2:21 pm [GMT-0500] by Visitor) ---

I do not think VoxForge is enough popular to get much donations.

--- (Edited on 4/19/2008 7:01 am [GMT-0500] by dano) ---

Well, it's really not a problem to donate something. It's just hard to do it from some countries ;). But do we need it at all, that's my question. Usually when project collects money it's always distract me. 

--- (Edited on 4/19/2008 7:21 am [GMT-0500] by nsh) ---

If people are willing to donate money, wouldn't they be also willing to invest some time (speech)? I want open source speech recognition to be able to my speech. Sure I would love it if it recognizes other peoples' speech as well, but people should also take their own responsability.

Having said that I do not completely oppose commercial solutions, but this one would be quite pricy I expect. I also doubt people would do a good job. Even people who really care for VoxForge make reading errors. Someone who cares more about the remuneration is bound to make more mistakes and it takes hours to then correct the corresponding prompts to match the speech. 

--- (Edited on 4/19/2008 2:36 pm [GMT-0500] by Robin) ---