As speech recognition systems become more accurate, they are used for more diverse applications. These applications often involve populations who never used a recogniser before and for whom the standard data for adult male, adult female, or mixed adult speech is not very representative. This paper will deal with issues concerning the collection and processing of data from those new speaker populations and from speakers of different languages. It deals with data collected for various projects, such as the KIDS database [1] and the Diplomat project [2]. It specifically discusses issues related to obtaining quantitatively and qualitatively sufficient amounts of speech from diverse speaker populations. Since the speech of these individuals is very different from the speech collected in the past, we assume that some hand labelling may be necessary and therefore also address the issue of ameliorating the labelling process.