Fisher English
by LDC
2000h of telephone conversations — scaled-up successor to Switchboard.
TL;DR
2000h of telephone conversations — scaled-up successor to Switchboard.
Best for conversational English ASR training at scale. Pricing: paid.
Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
paid
Platforms
LDC
What it is
Fisher English Parts 1+2 (LDC2004S13/LDC2005S13) is ~2000 hours of US English conversational telephone speech — the standard high-quantity conversational-ASR corpus. LDC paid.
Best for: Conversational English ASR training at scale.
Watch out for: LDC license · paid · 8 kHz telephone speech. Cite: Cieri et al., LREC 2004.
Watch out for: LDC license · paid · 8 kHz telephone speech. Cite: Cieri et al., LREC 2004.
Install / use
https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2004S13 # LDC membership
Features
| Speaker diarization | Yes |
| Word-level timestamps | No |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 1 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Fisher English vs Whipscribe
| Feature | Fisher English | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | paid | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | Yes | Yes |
| Word timestamps | No | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 1 | 99 |
| Platforms | LDC | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to Fisher English
Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.