Nvidia has announced a $1.5 million investment in Mozilla Common Voice to transform the speech recognition space, as the technology wind shifts to Voice products in a big way.
Over the next decade, voice is expected to be the primary way people interact with devices — from laptops and phones to digital assistants and retail kiosks. However, today’s speech devices are out of reach for most people because they are unable to understand a large number of the world’s languages, accents, and speech patterns.
To ensure that people around the world can benefit from this huge technological change, Mozilla has partnered with Nvidia, which will invest $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice, an ambitious open source initiative aimed at democratizing and diversifying Voice technology development.
Launched in 2017, Common Voice aims to level the playing field while alleviating AI bias. It allows anyone to donate their voice to a free, public database that startups, researchers and developers can use to train voice-enabled apps, products and services. Today, it represents the largest multilingual public domain speech data set in the world, with more than 9,000 hours of speech data in 60 different languages, including widely spoken and lesser-used languages such as Welsh and Kinyarandese, which is spoken in Rwanda. To date, more than 164,000 people worldwide have contributed to the project.
This investment will accelerate the growth of Common Voice’s data set, involve more communities and volunteers in the project, and support the hiring of new staff.