Since transcriptions, tagging and segmentation of speech data tend to be rather idiosyncratic, there are not many general purpose annotation tools available. In many projects special tools have been developed, or existing and publicly available tools have been adapted for special needs. Also, the production of speech corpora is a rather infrequent enterprise and therefore only very few commercial tools are developed and distributed in this area.
For these reasons in this section we will only describe two general purpose tools that are publicly available and may be of interest for the producer of a speech corpus involving manual annotation: WWWTranscribe (mainly used for transcription of large speech data bases) and Praat (often used for segmentation and labeling)