Mozilla announced today, June 7, that its Common Voice has begun going multilingual, now available in German, Welsh, and French. It is presently in the works to launch more than 40 languages additionally.
Common Voice was launched under the project Deep Speech in July 2017. Since then, Mozilla has collected about a million voice samples in English via its iOS app and website. The first version of the crowdsourced dataset was launched last November. It was downloaded thousands of times and found purpose in commercial voice products, Kaldi, the open-source software, and Deep Speech, Mozilla’s speech recognition engine.
The company aims to bring Common Voice to all, which means covering languages. In order to accomplish accordingly, it spent the last few months growing and supporting individual language communities around.
These communities are contributing to Mozilla’s initiative via providing copyright-free sentences to Common Voice, promoting the site in their countries, and creating communities of contributors. The objective is to ascend the total number of hours of data available in each language.
Numerous countries are already engaged in these activities: Germany, Kenya, Indonesia, Spain, Brazil, Taiwan, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia, Thailand, and Nepal.
Alongside English, Mozilla has started collecting voice samples in the three languages. Among the other 40+ languages that are on the way are ranging from the majorly used Spanish, Russian or Chinese to the less-used Norwegian, Frisian or Chuvash. Since the smaller languages are under-served by today’s commercial speech recognition services, Mozilla is covering them via the project.
According to the company, the huge dataset in its availability can facilitate entrepreneurs and communities to individually address the existing discrimination of languages.
Mozilla invites people across the world to donate voice on the website and using its iOS app. Furthermore, its will help people interested in bringing Common Voice and speech tech to their languages.
