Common Voice
Common Voice is a crowdsourcing project started by Mozilla to create a free database for speech recognition software. The project is supported by volunteers who record sample sentences with a microphone and review recordings of other users. The transcribed sentences will be collected in a voice database available under the public domain license CC0. This license ensures that developers can use the database for voice-to-text applications without restrictions or costs.
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| Developer(s) | Mozilla Foundation |
|---|---|
| Initial release | June 19, 2017 |
| Repository | https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web |
| Available in | Multilingual (List of languages) |
| License | Creative Commons CC0 |
| Website | commonvoice.mozilla.org |
Aims
Common Voice aims to provide diverse voice samples. According to Mozilla's Katharina Borchert, many existing projects took datasets from public radio or otherwise had datasets that underrepresented both women and people with pronounced accents.[1]
Voice database
The first dataset was released in November 2017. More than 20,000 users worldwide had recorded 500 hours of English sentences.[2]
In February 2019, the first batch of languages was released for use. This included 18 languages: English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese, but also less prevalent languages as Welsh and Kabyle. In total, this included almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice data from more than 42,000 contributors.[3]
As of July 2020 the database has amassed 7,226 hours of voice recordings in 54 languages, 5,591 hours of which has been verified by volunteers.[4]
In May 2021, following the work to add Kinyarwanda, they received a grant to add Kiswahili.[5]
See also
References
- "Why do we gender AI? Voice tech firms move to be more inclusive". The Guardian. 11 January 2020. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
- "Announcing the Initial Release of Mozilla's Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Dataset". blog mozilla.org. November 29, 2017.
- "Mozilla updates Common Voice dataset with 1,400 hours of speech across 18 languages". VentureBeat. February 28, 2019.
- "Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the 'Hey Firefox' wakeword for voice-based web browsing". VentureBeat. 1 July 2020. Archived from the original on March 10, 2021. Retrieved 1 April 2021.
- "Mozilla Common Voice Receives $3.4 Million Investment to Democratize and Diversify Voice Tech in East Africa". Mozilla Foundation. 2021-05-25. Retrieved 2021-06-03.