Did they consider to use MTurk for this?
If you want to read more about it, the GitHub repo and in particular the issues cover a lot of the obvious questions like this. They're here: https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web/issues
However, Mech Turk is better for things like validation, since you only need a handful of people doing the majority of work.
In any case, I have some very hacky tools we used for this exploration, if you are interested: https://github.com/mikehenrty/mech-turk/