From the beginning, the Spoken Language Working Group placed great emphasis on the need to reflect the wide (and possibly disparate) views of the spoken language R&D community at large. Therefore, the activities of the Group were made public at every opportunity (for example, at the annual meetings organised by the International Coordinating Committee on Speech Databases and Assessment - COCOSDA). Also, specific consultation periods were established between November 1993 and July 1994, and from October 1994 to May 1995 in which draft documentation was made available publicly on the Internet.
An additional consultation was coordinated at the international level by the central EAGLES administration. Over forty institutions worldwide were sent copies of the interim handbook for formal review. These included European industries such as Philips, Hewlett-Packard, Daimler-Benz, Siemens, GEC, Vecsys, Alcatel, Dragon UK, MATRA and ENSIGMA; European PTTs such as Telefonica, British Telecom, Telia, Jutland Telephone, CNET and the Dutch PTT; European research institutions such as ENST, University of Valencia, IDIAP, KTH, University of Essex, University of Patras, University of Catalunya, University of Leeds and Cambridge University; non-European industries such as Dragon Systems, ETL, IBM, VPC, Entropic and Apple; non-European PTTs such as NTT, ATR, Nynex, Bellcore and Bell Labs; non-European research institutions such as OGI, University of Sydney, University of Tsukuba, Australian National University, University of Berkeley and MIT; and important spoken language resource centres such as the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and the US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) .
The feedback received from this formal review process was incorporated into the activities of the Group and thence into the handbook itself.