Speech tech and Common Voice at Mozilla

Many people are excited about creating usable speech technology. However, most of the audio data used by large companies isn’t available to the majority of people, and that data is often biased in terms of language, accent, and gender. Jenny, Josh, and Remy from Mozilla join us to discuss how Mozilla is building an open-source voice database that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web (Common Voice). They also discuss efforts through Mozilla fellowship program to develop speech tech for African languages and understand bias in data sets.

Many people are excited about creating usable speech technology. However, most of the audio data used by large companies isn’t available to the majority of people, and that data is often biased in terms of language, accent, and gender. Jenny, Josh, and Remy from Mozilla join us to discuss how Mozilla is building an open-source voice database that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web (Common Voice). They also discuss efforts through Mozilla fellowship program to develop speech tech for African languages and understand bias in data sets.

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Featuring:

Jenny Zhang – Twitter, WebsiteRemy Muhire – Twitter, GitHubJosh Meyer – Twitter, GitHubChris Benson – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, WebsiteDaniel Whitenack – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Show Notes:

Mozilla Common Voice
Announcement of Josh and Remy’s fellowship work on speech tech for African languages
Artie Bias Corpus
Readings on Demographic Bias in ASR:

Voice recognition still has significant race and gender biases
Gender and Dialect Bias in YouTube’s Automatic Captions
Racial disparities in automated speech recognition

Common Voice LREC Paper
Common Voice + DeepSpeech collaborators for Low-resource languages:

Digital Umuganda
AI Lab, Makerere University
Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University
Linguistics Department, Indiana University Bloomington

“under-sampled majority” is a quote from Joy Boulamwini (see this article)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!