Slashdot: Mozilla's New Open Source Voice-Recognition Project Wants Your Voice

Mozilla’s New Open Source Voice-Recognition Project Wants Your Voice
Published on July 22, 2017 at 06:34PM
An anonymous reader quotes Mashable:
Mozilla is building a massive repository of voice recordings for the voice apps of the future — and it wants you to add yours to the collection. The organization behind the Firefox browser is launching Common Voice, a project to crowdsource audio samples from the public. The goal is to collect about 10,000 hours of audio in various accents and make it publicly available for everyone… Mozilla hopes to hand over the public dataset to independent developers so they can harness the crowdsourced audio to build the next generation of voice-powered apps and speech-to-text programs… You can also help train the speech-to-text capabilities by validating the recordings already submitted to the project. Just listen to a short clip, and report back if text on the screen matches what you heard… Mozilla says it aims is to expand the tech beyond just a standard voice recognition experience, including multiple accents, demographics and eventually languages for more accessible programs.
Past open source voice-recognition projects have included Sphinx 4 and VoxForge, but unfortunately most of today’s systems are still “locked up behind proprietary code at various companies, such as Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.”