ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015

Voice Äpp: a mobile app for crowdsourcing Swiss German dialect data

Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly, Jean-Philippe Goldman, Volker Dellwo, Ingrid Hove, Ibrahim Almajai, Sarah Grimm, Sylvain Robert, Daniel Wanitsch

Crowdsourcing speech data through mobile applications is relatively new. In the present contribution we add to the existing body of research an innovative Android and iOS application called `Voice Äpp'. The free app is pioneering in the sense that it leverages its function as a medium for science communication — thus attracting an extensive user base — to crowdsource audio and dialect data. The app was launched in early 2015 and has already been downloaded 19k times. Nearly half a million audio tokens have been crowdsourced. In this system levels contribution we describe the basic functionalities of the app — voice and dialect analysis —, we present the scientific potential of the corpus created, and discuss methodological issues related to crowdsourcing audio data through mobile applications.