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Common Voice

commonvoice.mozilla.org

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Re: Common Voice

#31
I submitted a request for Norwegian Bokmål, and realised a complication which I'm sure must affect other languages too:

Norway has two separate official languages. They are unusually close - one is relatively close to Danish, and the other started as a collection of dialects, but technically they are written languages, especially Bokmål which basically means "book language".

I'm unusual in that I speak close to "pure" Bokmål. Thanks to expectations at school etc., a lot of speakers who write Bokmål will adjust or tone down their dialect if asked to read a text that is written in grammatically and orthographically correct bokmål, but will otherwise speak in a manner that can deviate fairly significantly from the written language.

As such, depending on whether your goal is text to speech or speech recognition, the pronunciation you will need is very different.

E.g. people I know who write Bokmål might say something like "hva erredu ser på a?" ("what are you looking at?") with hardly any gaps between words, while I would stick close to the written "hva er det du ser på?" with clear gaps. In recognition you need to handle both (and many other variations), while for generation you'd at least by default usually want the latter unless there are indications the text is written in dialect.

It strikes me you'd really want people to write more detail about what it is they are speaking and/or let people tag/label data with additional info about accents. Not just for this, but for other multi-lingual speakers as well. E.g. it'd be helpful to have many foreign accents in the English (and other languages) dataset for recognition, but as much as I want speech recognition to understand me, I'm not particularly interested in teaching it to speak English with a strong Norwegian accent.

That is less of an issue than the dialects in some languages that can involve much more than just speaking the same words differently.

To take another example "Jeg åpnet døren og gikk ut i solen" og "Jeg åpna døra og gikk ut i sola" are both valid Bokmål. Depending on context a reader may stick strictly to the text or swap åpnetåpna, dørendøra, solasola, and every permutation is valid. Which exact set you use differs and some speakers will write one but use the other when speaking. E.g. I would say åpna, døra, sola, but write åpnet, døren, solen. The latter is more formal and/or old-fashioned in some parts of the country, but the perception of that also varies by region. And this totally leaves out all the dialect variations used by people who'd say their language is Bokmål, and would be recognized as such by Norwegian speakers, but who use variants of words or conjugations that aren't technically recognized as valid Bokmål.

The former is more "modern" (several of the forms are only valid Bokmål as a result of successive language reforms), more common in the Eastern part of Norway outside of the posher parts of Oslo and other wealthy regions, and (weirdly) more common in 1970's radical left-wing academics (especially people involved with the Maoist Workers Communist Party/AKP-ML) as an affectation/sociolect, with each of these groups also deviating in other aspects....

If you want to maximize the utility of a dataset like this, you really would want to let each speaker at least assign a lot of tags/labels to their profile; even if you don't want to deal with the hornet nest of trying to figure out all the distinctions, even unstructured labels would be a start, and ideally allowing people to tag individual recordings as well, because there are a lot more variations than just "language" and "accent" here.

Re: Common Voice

#33
post #31

I submitted a request for Norwegian Bokmål, and realised a complication which I'm sure must affect other languages too: Norway has two separate official languages. They are unusually close - one is relatively close to Danish, and the other started as a collection of dialects, but technically they are written languages, especially Bokmål which basically means "book language". I'm unusual in that I speak close to "pure…

This is a great argument.

I particularly agree with your point regarding English - my German accent sounds jarring to probably most native English speakers, but it should still be understood. To add to your argument, I have sometimes tried to turn on subtitles for Youtube videos in some accent of English that I haven't had much contact with (such as Nigerian English), but the auto-generated closed captions turned out to be even more useless than my own comprehension.

However, one should keep in mind that Mozilla's main goal here is accessibility, with the implication that they mean accessibility for blind and deaf people in particular - as opposed to accessibility for stunted multilinguals like us. For these purposes, being able to transcribe mainly mainstream uses of the language is fine, and so is being able to generate speech in a hodge-podge averaged dialect. I highly doubt most blind people care about whether their TTS engine speaks The Queen's English or not, as long as it is clear and understandable.

Re: Common Voice

#34
post #5

FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i

On macOS, it's

    say "enter text here"
To pick a different voice:

    say -v Fred "enter text here"
To list voices:

    say -v "?"
(The quoting is necessary to prevent ZSH from interpreting the question mark as a glob.)

I hear Firefox's TTL is important, yet prior to your comment I didn't even know it existed. This sort of stuff should be more discoverable, and have a more accessible (ahem) API.

Re: Common Voice

#35
post #5

FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i

It looks like speechSynthesis is supported in all the major browsers, not just FF. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/spee...

Re: Common Voice

#36
post #31

I submitted a request for Norwegian Bokmål, and realised a complication which I'm sure must affect other languages too: Norway has two separate official languages. They are unusually close - one is relatively close to Danish, and the other started as a collection of dialects, but technically they are written languages, especially Bokmål which basically means "book language". I'm unusual in that I speak close to "pure…

This is a great argument. I particularly agree with your point regarding English - my German accent sounds jarring to probably most native English speakers, but it should still be understood. To add to your argument, I have sometimes tried to turn on subtitles for Youtube videos in some accent of English that I haven't had much contact with (such as Nigerian English), but the auto-generated closed captions turned out…

What is "clear and understandable" varies greatly, though. E.g. Nigerian English is often subtitled in the UK, but fairly often so is Scottish English... Both often to the great dismay of speakers of the two who sometimes are very annoyed at the expectation that people might not understand them.

Nigerian English is actually fascinating in that there's a whole spectrum from Nigerian Pidgin, which ranges from nearly unintelligible to English speakers, to "mostly British English" in terms of orthography and grammar, but which still tends to incorporate words from several differences Nigerian languages and pidgin. (e.g. abeg, don't give me any wahala; Please, don't give me any trouble)

Now consider Nigeria is about to become the country with the second largest number of English speakers worldwide (it's close to tied with India, depending which sources and level of proficiency you consider, and Nigeria's population is growing far faster than India's), and while it's still quite far behind the UK for people speaking it as their first language, with current population growth and increasing use of English (e.g. my ex wife's first language is English because her parents first languages were Igbo and Yoruba, and that kind of situation is driving adoption) likely to cause Nigeria to become the second largest on that measure as well.

So handling a broader range of dialects will matter, at least in terms of recognition - I do agree that there's more flexibility for generation, though even there if you try feed a broader Nigerian English pidgin to a TTS engine and it doesn't know what to do with the words it might well end up being unintelligible both to eg. American or British English speakers and Nigerian English speakers.

Re: Common Voice

#37
post #5

FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i

Do you know if it’s been extracted into a standalone library? The state of the open source TTS seems to not be great. Presumably the data for a voice is harder to put together than training a speech to text system like whisper.

Re: Common Voice

#39
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSpeech? https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech

Mozilla didn't want to fund further development, most of the team ended up at Coqui.ai

Mozilla shut that project down same day (Apr 12, 2021) as: "Mozilla is partnering with NVIDIA, which is investing $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice,". Aka they got paid off by Nvidia to not compete.

Re: Common Voice

#40
I'd like to give a shout-out to Common Voice Android: https://github.com/Sav22999/common-voice-android

It's a handy app for those interested in contributing to the project. You can record voices for the languages you speak and validate other user contributions. I used to be a frequent contributor about two years ago, and this app had a much more user-friendly design compared to the official website version.

Additionally, check out the official Common Voice Matrix channel: https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#common-voice:mozilla.org

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