Hi everyone, hope you're off to a good start with this challenge and have planned or started recording for your languages.

Office Hours: We are hosting our first office hours next Thursday with the Google speech team linguists from the workshop. Please sign up for a slot using the calendar appointment link below.

• These are 30 minute open office hour sessions that as many people that would like can join. The slots are listed as 1 minute duration each just so many people can sign up into the same 30 minutes, but you're welcome to come and go any time (and stay as long as you'd like) in the 30 minutes session regardless of what 1 minute slot you sign up for.
• The office hours will run every two weeks until the end of the competition (April 17). If no one signs up for a slot by the day before an office hour, we will cancel it for the week.
• https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/selfsched?sstoken=UU16VjBRb0hoNzV4fGRlZmF1bHR8ZDFiM2VhNGJjZWM3NDU2NzQ3ZWUxMDY2NjM3MDMyNTk

An update about speech recording apps: We've found that some are having issues with the Lig-Aikuma app crashing. The Lig-Aikuma app was suggested because it was open source and designed with ASR collection in mind, but you're welcome to use any speech recording app you'd like (even if it's not open source, as long as it's free and you're not paying for any of the features).

• Here is another open source app, Simple Voice Recorder.
• And here is a list of other speech recorder apps (you're not limited to this list, you can use anything that's free and publicly available). You may want to try a few out to see which you like best: https://www.rev.com/blog/best-voice-recorder-apps-for-android
• Tip: When figuring out which app you'd like to use, some things you might want to consider are: Do I need the app to work offline and if so, can it work offline? Where does it store the data (do you want to store it to phone or SD card, and then transfer to computer or online storage)?

Please let me know if you have any questions.

And please comment if you've started using any of the speech recording apps and which ones you like?

-Connie