The Aurora project was originally set up to establish a world wide standard for the feature extraction software which forms the core of the front-end of a DSR (Distributed Speech Recognition) system. ETSI formally adopted this activity as work items 007 and 008.

The two work items within ETSI are:
- ETSI DES/STQ WI007: Distributed Speech Recognition - Front-End Feature Extraction Algorithm & Compression Algorithm
- ETSI DES/STQ WI008: Distributed Speech Recognition - Advanced Feature Extraction Algorithm.

This database is a subset of the SpeechDat-Car database in Finnish language which has been collected as part of the European Union funded SpeechDat-Car project. It contains isolated and connected Finnish digits spoken in the following driving conditions inside a car:

1. 0 km/hr with the car engine on
2. 40-60 km/hr with the car windows closed
3. 40-60 km/hr with the car windows open
4. 100-120km/hr with no music in the background
5. 100-120km/hr with music in the background

The database also contains the software needed to run simulations using the Entropic's HTK, which has been adopted as the "standard" HMM recogniser for the Aurora standard evaluation