Mozilla's effort to crowdsource datasets for voice recognition applications such as digital assistants has expanded to include 3 more languages, and soon many others:
Mozilla launched the first fruits of its Common Voice datasets in English back in November, a collection that contained some 500 hours of speech and constituted 400,000 recordings from 20,000 individuals. Today, Mozilla officially kick starts the process of collecting voice data for three more languages — French, German, and — a little randomly — Welsh. Another 40 tongues are currently being prepped for the data collection process, with the likes of Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Taiwan), Indonesian, Polish, and Dutch already halfway toward being ready to start crowdsourcing voice data.
[...] "We believe these interfaces shouldn't be controlled by a few companies as gatekeepers to voice-enabled services, and we want users to be understood consistently, in their own languages and accents," said Mozilla's chief innovation officer, Katharina Borchert, in a blog post.
The Common Voice project serves a purpose similar to that of other open-license projects that have emerged to counter privately owned platforms. OpenStreetMap is a good example of a similarly crowdsourced project that gives developers open and freely usable maps of the world, without the costs or restrictions of rival services such as Google Maps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @08:21AM
How Mozilla thinks:
- Firefox users are leaving, and we don't have money to fix the problems.
- Let's spend money on building an OS.
- Now we have even less money to fix the browser, and even more users are leaving.
- Let's spend money on a voice assistant.