  The People's Speech is a free-to-download 30,000-hour and growing supervised
conversational English speech recognition dataset licensed for academic and
commercial usage under CC-BY-SA (with a CC-BY subset). The data is collected
via searching the Internet for appropriately licensed audio data with existing
transcriptions. We describe our data collection methodology and release our
data collection system under the Apache 2.0 license. We show that a model
trained on this dataset achieves a 9.98% word error rate on Librispeech's
test-clean test set.Finally, we discuss the legal and ethical issues
surrounding the creation of a sizable machine learning corpora and plans for
continued maintenance of the project under MLCommons's sponsorship.
