  The Donate Speech campaign has so far succeeded in gathering approximately
3600 hours of ordinary, colloquial Finnish speech into the Lahjoita puhetta
(Donate Speech) corpus. The corpus includes over twenty thousand speakers from
all the regions of Finland and from all age brackets. The primary goals of the
collection were to create a representative, large-scale resource to study
spontaneous spoken Finnish and to accelerate the development of language
technology and speech-based services. In this paper, we present the collection
process and the collected corpus, and showcase its versatility through multiple
use cases. The evaluated use cases include: automatic speech recognition of
spontaneous speech, detection of age, gender, dialect and topic and metadata
analysis. We provide benchmarks for the use cases, as well down loadable,
trained baseline systems with open-source code for reproducibility. One further
use case is to verify the metadata and transcripts given in this corpus itself,
and to suggest artificial metadata and transcripts for the part of the corpus
where it is missing.
