Mozilla updates Common Voice dataset with 1,400 hours of speech across 18 languages
Mozilla wants to make it easier for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Toward that end, it's today releasing the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data that now comprises over 1,400 hours of voice samples from 42,000 contributors across 18 languages, including English, French, German, Dutch, Hakha-Chin, Esperanto, Farsi, Basque, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Welsh, and Kabyle.
It's one of the largest multi-language dataset of its kind, Mozilla claims — substantially larger than the Common Voice corpus it made publicly available eight months ago, which contained 500 hours (400,000 recordings) from 20,000 volunteers in English — and the corpus will soon grow larger still. The organization says that data collection efforts in 70 languages are actively underway via the Common Voice website and mobile apps.
Common Voice home page. Also at Engadget.
Previously: Mozilla's "Common Voice": Voice Recognition Without Google, Amazon, Baidu, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Mozilla's Common Voice Collecting French, German, and Welsh Samples, Prepping 40 More Languages
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Mozilla wants to crowdsource thousands of hours of voice recordings for an open source voice recognition engine:
The Mozilla Foundation launched "Common Voice," which is a crowdsourced initiative to build an open source data set for voice recognition applications.
Many technology companies believe that voice control will be embedded into most devices in the future. This is why Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, and others are all trying to put their own voice-controlled artificial intelligence assistants into as many devices as they can and as fast as they can, in order to gain market share before the competition.
The problem with this, according to Mozilla, is that voice controlled technologies could end up being dominated by proprietary technology and data sets, which aren't made available to startups and academics. As some large companies already benefit from billion-dollar revenues, it could later become too difficult for startups to catch up with the big players. Though[sic] Common Voice, Mozilla aims to democratize voice recognition technology.
You could use this to build (the easy part of) a personal assistant that either does not use the cloud, or does so on your terms.
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.
Hugging Face raises $15 million to build open source community for cutting-edge conversational AI
Hugging Face has announced the close of a $15 million series A funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman, as well as Betaworks and A.Capital.
New-York based Hugging Face started as a chatbot company, but then began to use Transformers, an approach to conversational AI that's become a foundation for state-of-the-art algorithms. The startup expands access to conversational AI by creating abstraction layers for developers and manufacturers to quickly adopt cutting-edge conversational AI, like Google's BERT and XLNet and OpenAI's GPT-2 or AI for edge devices. More than 1,000 companies use Hugging Face solutions today, including Microsoft's Bing.
The funding will be used to grow the Hugging Face team and continue development of an open source community for conversational AI. Efforts will include making it easier for contributors to add models to Hugging Face libraries and the release of additional open source tech, like a tokenizer.
Also at TechCrunch.
Related: Facebook Open sources PyText NLP Framework
Mozilla Expands Common Voice Database to 18 Languages, With More on the Way
Investigating the Self-Attention Mechanism Behind BERT-Based Architectures
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 01 2019, @03:13AM (5 children)
So, uhhhhh, nothing super special? Useful, maybe, but nothing super special.
Don't we all love meaningless sales pitches?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday March 01 2019, @03:47AM
LICENSE
CC-0
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ [creativecommons.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @04:31AM
The good thing with aging related dementia . . . it's kind. For, in its kindness, the sufferer is blissful unaware of the affliction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @04:36AM
Do you feel like you are denied something super special, something that you totally deserve?
'Useful' and 'meaningless' . . . I see you mastered the art of cognitive dissonance.
(Score: 5, Informative) by richtopia on Friday March 01 2019, @06:16AM (1 child)
There are larger databases, but not publically available. Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana's voice recognition system trained on similar datasets. Mozilla's motivation is to provide an open alternative, and even the reference dataset is a step forward to competing with these services.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 01 2019, @04:03PM
No thanks Mozilla. Such databases should be much larger, like those "not publicly available" ones, and for FREE. Because I'm entitled!
And by the way . . .
It is the government's and everyone else's duty to guarantee my happiness. Doesn't the constitution guarantee my happiness? I shouldn't have to "pursue" happiness. That would require some effort and sounds too much like something called "work". I've got it! I'll become a "Social Media Influencer"! That's it! I can get free stuff for doing no actual work except posting excessively long and content free YouTube videos! It's a great career path!
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @10:57PM
What I said: "Fetch me a sandwich, bitch". What it transcribed: "Error 25. Violation of Code of Conduct. Report for re-education." Fuck you, Mozilla.