Speaking in Many Tongues: Mozilla’s Common Voice Project

[ UUID ] 97a3b0ee-aa3b-4c77-993f-cd6af659c5e4

[ Session Name ] Speaking in Many Tongues: Mozilla’s Common Voice Project [ Primary Space ] Digital Inclusion

[ Submitter's Name ] Delyth Prys [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] Bangor University

[ Other Facilitator 1's Name ] Rhoslyn Prys

[ Other Facilitator 2's Name ] Michael Henretty

[ Other Facilitator 3's Name ] S M Sarwar Nobin

What will happen in your session?

We will present Common Voice, Mozilla's crowdsourcing project to create resources for speech recognition in multiple languages. We will use a 'kiosk' to collect as many recordings as possible of people reading aloud preprepared recording prompts. Participants will also be able to listen to recordings of others who have contributed their voices and evaluate them using the project interface (this is a good way of engaging with shyer participants). We will encourage speakers of languages not already covered by the project to submit a request for their language and help Common Voice increase the number of languages covered.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

The goal is to raise awareness of the Common Voice project and of speech recognition in general as a tool for digital inclusion. It aims to teach the importance of providing communication aids for people in their own language, and especially to reach less-resourced language communities and those of less commercial interest to large corporations. It will increase the number of recordings in the Common Voice project across all languages at present represented, and make the case for the inclusion of some new ones. It will provide the opportunity for participants to learn more about how speech recognition technology is created and engage in a practical activity to develop it in an inclusive, crowdsourced way.

If your session requires additional materials or electronic equipment, please outline your needs.

Our main need will be for a quiet corner (difficult at Mozfest I know!). We will be bringing our own laptops and iPads and will only need somewhere to charge them.

Time needed

All weekend, as an installation, exhibit or drop-in session