As technology makes massive shift to voice-enabled products, NVIDIA invests $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice to transform the voice recognition landscape <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the next decade, speech is expected to become the primary way people interact with devices \u2014 from laptops and phones to digital assistants and retail kiosks. Today\u2019s voice-enabled devices, however, are inaccessible to much of humanity because they cannot understand vast swaths of the world\u2019s languages, accents, and speech patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To help ensure that people everywhere benefit from this massive technological shift, Mozilla is partnering with NVIDIA, which is investing $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice, an ambitious, open-source initiative aimed at democratizing and diversifying voice technology development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the voice data currently used to train machine learning algorithms is held by a handful of major companies. This poses challenges for others seeking to develop high-quality speech recognition technologies, while also exacerbating the voice recognition divide between English speakers and the rest of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Launched in 2017, Common Voice aims to level the playing field while mitigating AI bias. It enables anyone to donate their voices to a free, publicly available database that startups, researchers, and developers can use to train voice-enabled apps, products, and services. Today, it represents the world\u2019s largest multi-language public domain voice data set, with more than 9,000 hours of voice data in 60 different languages, including widely spoken languages and less used ones like Welsh and Kinyarwanda, which is spoken in Rwanda. More than 164,000 people worldwide have contributed to the project thus far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This investment will accelerate the growth of Common Voice\u2019s data set, engage more communities and volunteers in the project, and support the hiring of new staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n