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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by KritonK on Thursday July 20 2017, @09:46AM (6 children)
An interesting part of the project is the validation, where you get to listen to various samples and verify that the speakers actually said what they were asked to say. You get to listen to some wonderful and (some not so wonderful) accents from all over the English-speaking world.
This is actually a necessary step. Apart from the inevitable "my hovercraft is full of eels", that some wise guy is bound to say instead of the requested phrase, a short sampling showed that some samples contain mispronounced, misread, and doubly read words. I chose to consider all of those as mistakes. There are also extraneous noises, which voice recognition software should be able to filter out, so I considered these samples correct, as long as the speaker said what they were asked to say.
Then there's the matter of who validates the validators. I hope that Mozilla is adopting an "n out of n identical validations or back to the pool" approach, to prevent incorrect validations made either by malice or mistake.
I was really impressed by the amount of expression that many readers put in their voice when reading the samples. On the other hand, there was this guy, who managed to drone on, and on, and on, even though he was reading a single sentence!
The above should have getting a large corpus of spoken English samples covered eventually, leaving only the remaining n-1 languages and dialects spoken throughout the world and beyond (e.g., Klingon).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @09:52AM
If a high enough percentage of the samples are correct, maybe the system can validate by itself.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:38PM
Example: if you need a text typed with at most 1/1,000,000 characters mistaken and a good typist has a mistake rate of 1/1000, it's just as costly to hire a typist and a proof-reader or two typists inputting the same text independently - in the latter case, the chance of an independent double mistake affecting the same character is 1/1,000,000.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday July 20 2017, @02:24PM (3 children)
Mozilla could use a failed meta-mod system like the green site does. That worked out very whale.
If AI causes human extinction, there will probably be quite a lawsuit over that.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday July 20 2017, @05:40PM (2 children)
Would it work whale enough to understand this speech [hrwiki.org]?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @05:46PM
Sever your leg please, it's the greatest day!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 20 2017, @06:02PM
I don't know. But try this one:
I saw a snike. Eat head beeg blow oys and a huge tile.
Or try this:
Dem gubmit foaks shore is ignert.
Maw brothuh from jaw-jah eaze too.
Hay sez duh peekup trook brokes down.
I sez, ov curse eat brokes down. Yaw deedn't puts no all in duh in-jun.
If AI causes human extinction, there will probably be quite a lawsuit over that.