In this paper we present the collection of Greek speech data over the telephone network from 5;000 speakers in order to form a speech database (SpeechDatII.GR). This work is embedded in the Language Engineering Project LE2-4001 SpeechDat, in which all official European languages and some major dialectal variants are represented. The design of the speech database allows the development of word, phoneme and syllable based speech recognizers that can be used for a large variety of real speaker independent applications. In particular it will provide a realistic basis for training and assessment of both isolated and continuous speech recognizers for telephone speech, which is a prerequisite for developing voice driven teleservices.