Building and curating conversational corpora for diversity-aware language science and technology

We present a pipeline and tools to build a maximally natural data set of conversational interaction that covers 66 languages and varieties from 32 phyla. We describe the curation and compilation process moving from diverse language documentation corpora to a unified format and describe an open-source tool "convo-parse" to help in quality control and assessment of conversational data. We conclude with two case studies of how diverse data sets can inform interactional linguistics and speech recognition technology and thus contribute to broadening the empirical foundations of language sciences and technologies of the future.