Common Voice Explained

Common Voice
Website:	commonvoice.mozilla.org
Language:	Multilingual (List of languages)
Developer:	Mozilla Foundation
License:	Creative Commons CC0

Common Voice is a crowdsourcing project started by Mozilla to create a free database for speech recognition software. The project is supported by volunteers who record sample sentences with a microphone and review recordings of other users. The transcribed sentences will be collected in a voice database available under the public domain license CC0. This license ensures that developers can use the database for voice-to-text applications without restrictions or costs.

Aims

Common Voice aims to provide diverse voice samples. According to Mozilla's Katharina Borchert, many existing projects took datasets from public radio or otherwise had datasets that underrepresented both women and people with pronounced accents.^[1]

History

At the beginning of 2022, Bengali.AI partnered with Common Voice to launch "Bangla Speech Recognition" project that aims to make machines understand Bangla language. 2000 hours of voice was collected with aim for higher than 10,000 hours.^[2]

Voice database

The first dataset was released in November 2017. More than 20,000 users worldwide had recorded 500 hours of English sentences.^[3]

In February 2019, the first batch of languages was released for use. This included 18 languages: English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese, but also less prevalent languages as Welsh and Kabyle. In total, this included almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice data from more than 42,000 contributors.^[4]

As of July 2020 the database has amassed 7,226 hours of voice recordings in 54 languages, 5,591 hours of which has been verified by volunteers.^[5]

In May 2021, following the work to add Kinyarwanda, they received a grant to add Kiswahili.^[6]

In September 2022, it was announced that the Twi language of Ghana was the 100th language to be added to the Mozilla Common Voice database.^[7]

, Mozilla Common Voice officially collects voice data for the following languages:^[8]

• Abkhaz
• Arabic
• Armenian
• Assamese
• Asturian
• Bashkir
• Basaa
• Basque
• Belarusian
• Bengali
• Breton
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin varieties)
• Chuvash
  • Czech Danish
• Dhivehi
• Dutch
• English
• Esperanto
• Erzya
  • • Finnish French Frisian
• Galician
• Georgian
  • • German Greek Guaraní
• Hausa
• Hakha Chin
  • • • Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Interlingua
• Irish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Kabyle
• Kazakh
• Kinyarwanda
• Korean
• Kurdish (Central and Kurmanji varieties)
• Kyrgyz
• Latvian
• Luganda
• Macedonian
• Malayalam
• Maltese
• Marathi
• Mari (Meadow and Hill varieties)
• Moksha
• Mongolian
• Nepali
• Norwegian (Nynorsk)
• Odia
• Persian
  • Polish Portuguese
• Punjabi
  • Romanian Romansh (Sursilvan and Vallader varieties)
    • Russian Sakha Santali
• Saraiki
• Sardinian
• Serbian
• Slovenian
  • Spanish Swahili
  • Swedish Taiwanese Hokkien
• Tamil
• Tatar
• Thai
• Tigre
• Tigrinya
• Toki Pona
• Twi
• Turkish
• Upper Sorbian
• Ukrainian
• Urdu
• Uyghur
• Uzbek
• Vietnamese
• Votic
• Welsh

See also

• Forvo
• Lingua Libre
• Crowdsource (app)

References

1. News: 11 January 2020 . Why do we gender AI? Voice tech firms move to be more inclusive . The Guardian . 19 April 2020 . 19 December 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20221219033558/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/11/why-do-we-gender-ai-voice-tech-firms-move-to-be-more-inclusive . live .
2. Web site: 2022-12-23 . Bengali.AI: Democratising AI research in Bangla . 2022-12-25 . The Business Standard . en . 2022-12-24 . https://web.archive.org/web/20221224094036/https://www.tbsnews.net/features/panorama/bengaliai-democratising-ai-research-bangla-556458 . live .
3. Web site: Announcing the Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Dataset. November 29, 2017. blog mozilla.org. November 19, 2019. November 29, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20171129164616/https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-initial-release-of-mozillas-open-source-speech-recognition-model-and-voice-dataset. live.
4. Web site: Mozilla updates Common Voice dataset with 1,400 hours of speech across 18 languages. VentureBeat. February 28, 2019. November 19, 2019. March 4, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190304213117/https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/28/mozilla-updates-common-voice-dataset-with-1400-hours-of-speech-across-19-languages. live.
5. Web site: Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the ‘Hey Firefox’ wakeword for voice-based web browsing . VentureBeat . 1 April 2021 . https://web.archive.org/web/20210310211235/https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/01/mozilla-common-voice-updates-will-help-train-the-hey-firefox-wakeword-for-voice-based-web-browsing/ . March 10, 2021 . 1 July 2020.
6. Web site: 2021-05-25. Mozilla Common Voice Receives $3.4 Million Investment to Democratize and Diversify Voice Tech in East Africa. 2021-06-03. Mozilla Foundation. en. 2022-12-19. https://web.archive.org/web/20221219033600/https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-common-voice-receives-34-million-investment-to-democratize-and-diversify-voice-tech-in-east-africa/. live.
7. Web site: Onukwue . Alexander . Ghana’s most popular language is now on Mozilla Common Voice . Quartz . 3 October 2022 . en-us . 23 September 2022 . 2 December 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20221202202435/https://qz.com/ghana-s-most-popular-language-will-be-available-to-more-1849572359 . live .
8. Web site: Languages . commonvoice.mozilla.org . 4 October 2022 . en . 24 December 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20221224203252/https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/languages . live .