It is easy enough to digitize a large amount of speech data. But before it can be effectively used in speech research, it must be cataloged to indicate position and descriptions of words and phones that are present in the data. In the absence of adequate tools, experts must do these tasks manually. Given interactive, automatic, and semiautomatic speech analysis programs, one can significantly improve the quality of the data base and the productivity of the experts. This paper describes the structure and characteristics of programs developed at Carnegie‐Mellon University which interactively bootstrap themselves to generate symbolic descriptions of a given set of data. The present system contains programs for (1) generating environment and speaker adapted phone templates (2) interactive generation of a phone lexicon containing alternating pronunciation of words generated from data, and (3) a program for machine aided labeling of a given phrase or sentence giving the beginning and ending of each phone and each word. Using these programs, over three hours of connected speech data has been digitized, and analyzed, to generate symbolic descriptions of the data in terms of phones and words. Retrieval programs are then used to retrieve all symbols satisfying a given property.