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Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#21
post #4
post #2

How does this compare with Snips.co which can do offline speech recognition on a Rapberry Pi 3? Coyld this be used to train a model/engine that can be used that way?

The URL is https://snips.ai/ .

Thanks, going by memory which is apparently faulty.

Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#22
This is super cool, but I'd be cautious about the usefulness of this data set.

Both this data set and LibriSpeech are read speech, where the speaker was prompted with a transcription and asked to say it out loud. In practice it's very rare that you're trying to transcribe speech that's already been transcribed. Speech patterns for computer-directed speech (e.g. for voice activated user interfaces) or human-to-human speech (e.g. for meeting transcription) are quite different.

Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#24

If you want to help them out you can visit https://voice.mozilla.org/ and record some sentences.

They have an iOS app too: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/project-common-voice-by-mozi...

It’s a great idea to crowd source this. Wonder if this project can turn voice recognition into a solved problem.

I just set a daily reminder so I can do 10 minutes a day.

Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#25
post #8
post #7

Awesome, we're so close to having a speech-to-text system I can trust. I really wish Mozilla would release a keyboard app for Android. It would instantly be the single most trusted keyboard available.

Regarding Android keyboards, it is horrific that Google keyboard sends all your key presses, except passwords, to them.

Does it? That would certainly be pretty alarming, but I can't seem to find any evidence that it does. The only relevant article I could find was this one on Gboard on iOS: https://www.macworld.com/article/3070767/ios/googles-gboard-... Seems to suggest that that at least their iOS keyboard doesn't send any data while typing. Could be different on Android, but I didn't find any articles suggesting that they are doing this. Wouldn't put past them to make a quiet change of a policy though.

Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... it does what? Even if you disable the "Share Snippets" option?

Everything by Google sends everything to Google.

but most useful keyboards require permissions that are scary...

Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#27
post #22

This is super cool, but I'd be cautious about the usefulness of this data set. Both this data set and LibriSpeech are read speech, where the speaker was prompted with a transcription and asked to say it out loud. In practice it's very rare that you're trying to transcribe speech that's already been transcribed. Speech patterns for computer-directed speech (e.g. for voice activated user interfaces) or human-to-human s…

Yup, this is an excellent point. We have, and will continue to explore ways to allow Common Voice users to speak more organically (for instance by answering a question, or responding free-form to some other sort of prompt). The problem with this approach is that it requires an extra step, transcription, which at the scale we are trying to achieve is pretty costly in either money or time (ie. tedium for our users). Eventually we hope that speech engines can take care of the transcription part, but for now we need people.

That said, we will definitely be exploring ways to build in organic speech and perhaps transcriptions to the Common Voice app. This will solve another problem for us too, which is getting public domain material for people to read. Doing this obviously requires a much more complex user experience, and we have more work to figure out how to make something that people will want to use and contribute to. Stay tuned for that :)

On the flip side, we hope that these datasets, models, and the tools (ie. DeepSpeech) can get more people (researchers, start-ups, hobbyist) over the hump of building an MVP of something useful in voice. Once you have people using your products, collecting useful in-context voice data becomes much easier.

On that note, another approach we are working on is partnering with universities and socially-aware startups like MyCroft, SNIPS, and Mythic. Imagine if voice products in market allowed their users to opt-in to contributing their utterances to an open resource similar to Common Voice. Of course, sharing your voice publicly is not for everyone, or every product scenario. But it does work for some. And if we pool our resources, our hope is to indeed commoditize speech-to-text so that we can focus on more interesting challenges like building voice experiences people want to use. (For instance, could voice somehow be a "progressive enhancement" to the web?).

Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#29
post #24

If you want to help them out you can visit https://voice.mozilla.org/ and record some sentences.

They have an iOS app too: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/project-common-voice-by-mozi... It’s a great idea to crowd source this. Wonder if this project can turn voice recognition into a solved problem. I just set a daily reminder so I can do 10 minutes a day.

Thank you so much!

I also want to emphasize the importance of listening (validating) as well as recording. Validation is an big part of the puzzle for building machine learning viable data.

Re: Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Data

#30
For those who don't know that open source speech recognition that does not depend on AI already exists:

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/

http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php

Maybe with this data set released eventually all that additional data will be used to improve those tools as well

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