Right. Um , OK. So why don't you tell us briefly
OK. So th
your  give  give your e normal schpiel.
Um. So this is  The project is called Meeting Recorder and there are lots of different aspects of the project. Um. So my particular interest is in the PDA of the future. This is a mock - up of one. Yes , we do believe the PDA of the future will be made of wood. Um.  The idea is that you 'd be able to put a PDA at the table at an impromptu meeting , and record it , and then be able to do querying and retrieval later on , on the meeting. So that 's my particular interest , is a portable device to do m uh , information retrieval on meetings. Other people are interested in other aspects of meetings. Um. So the first step on that , in any of these , is to collect some data. And so what we wanted is a room that 's instrumented with both the table top microphones , and these are very high quality pressure zone mikes , as well as the close talking mikes. What the close talk ng talking mikes gives us is some ground truth , gives us , um , high quality audio , um , especially for people who aren't interested in the acoustic parts of this corpus. So , for people who are more interested in language , we didn't want to penalize them by having only the far field mikes available. And then also , um , it 's a very , very hard task in terms of speech recognition. Um. And so , uh , on the far field mikes we can expect very low recognition results. So we wanted the near field mikes to at least isolate the difference between the two. So that 's why we 're recording in parallel with the close talking and the far field at the same time. And then , all these channels are recorded simultaneously and framed synchronously so that you can also do things like , um , beam - forming on all the microphones and do research like that. Our intention is to release this data to the public , um , probably through f through a body like the LDC. And , uh , just make it as a generally available corpus. Um.  There 's other work going on in meeting recording. So , we 're  we 're working with SRI , with UW , Um. NIST has started an effort which will include video. We 're not including video , obviously. And uh  and then also , um , a small amount of assistance from IBM. Is also involved. Um. Oh , and the digit strings , this is just a more constrained task. Um. So because the general environment is so challenging , we decided to  to do at least one set of digit strings to give ourselves something easier. And it 's exactly the same digit strings as in TI - digits , which is a common connected digits corpus. So we 'll have some , um , comparison to be able to be made.