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Project Common Voice

voice.mozilla.org

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Re: Project Common Voice

#31

Post by sirlantis »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #20

I hope this data will be used purely for voice recognition purposes and not for voice generation, or we'll be stuck with robots talking with this horrible gurgling and clicking accent due to poor recording conditions of most participants!

According to their FAQ they actually want those poor conditions to be present in the corpus.

> We want the audio quality to reflect the audio quality a speech-to-text engine will see in the wild. Thus, we want variety. This teaches the speech-to-text engine to handle various situations—background talking, car noise, fan noise—without errors.

https://voice.mozilla.org/faq

Re: Project Common Voice

#32

Post by giancarlostoro »

albertzeyer wrote: post #24

The terminology is a bit confusing. They are saying that they want to build voice recognition but it seems like they actually might want to build a speech recognition engine. Speech recognition is about recognizing the speech, the spoken words. Voice recognition is about recognizing the speakers voice, i.e. identifying the speaker. Also, maybe they also want to build a text-to-speech (TTS) system but I'm not sure. No…

Most people see "voice recognition" and think "speech recognition" I am guilty of this having never looked further into the term. I probably saw speech recognition and voice recognition and assumed they meant the same. At the very least now I know there's specifics to each term but I have a feeling most people don't. Maybe whoever wrote the page isn't an actual developer but just a volunteer writer?

Re: Project Common Voice

#33

Post by ancarda »

john2x wrote: post #26
albertzeyer wrote: post #24

The terminology is a bit confusing. They are saying that they want to build voice recognition but it seems like they actually might want to build a speech recognition engine. Speech recognition is about recognizing the speech, the spoken words. Voice recognition is about recognizing the speakers voice, i.e. identifying the speaker. Also, maybe they also want to build a text-to-speech (TTS) system but I'm not sure. No…

Could they use the different voices to generate unique, natural-sounding voices for text-to-speech?

I really hope so.

All the text-to-speech software I've used has a generic sounding accent for the country (your choices are typically American, Australian, British, Canadian) but there's a lot more accents out there. The software isn't bad - it sounds realistic - but I wish it sounded more how I would like it to.

There's some software, e.g. Cepstral Dallas - https://www.cepstral.com/en/demos but it sounds too robotic to actually use and that voice isn't available for Linux so I only have it installed on my MacBook.

I guess a lot of developers at e.g. Apple live in CA so Siri is probably influenced by that.

Re: Project Common Voice

#34

Post by giancarlostoro »

I wonder if implementing a new type of Recaptcha with these type of projects in mind would make sense. The data wouldn't be going to some data center in Google land, but instead to some open end that anyone should be able to get their hands on. Also a free and open source recaptcha alternative would be nice. Trick is keeping it complex enough that bots cannot just reuse the existing public data set. Maybe withhold on making some of the data public for a few years till deemed 'retired'.

Re: Project Common Voice

#37

Post by Jayakumark »

oulipo wrote: post #27
apeddle wrote: post #9

This looks great! I use voice control to program on occasion due to an rsi injury. The standard stack for this is a mess due to closed source systems that aren't designed for voice programmers. A good open solution could really save me from a lot of headaches.

You can take a look at what we build at https://snips.ai , we will open-source the platform later this year

Cool. Just curious on What is the voice engine behind snips ? and who is the provider of training data ?. Also do you have plans for supporting additional languages or can it be trained on when you open source it ?

Re: Project Common Voice

#38

Post by icc97 »

saurik wrote: post #28
jpalomaki wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's not yet good open datasets available for this kind of material? This gives Amazon, Apple and Google a nice advantage since they are able to collect huge sample sets of actual voice commands used by people and to some extent also correlate them with the actual action taken by the person. How could we collect such dataset? It's a bit chicken-egg problem. I don't want to talk to some open source system unl…

If you want people carefully reading books, it is pretty easy to get a hold of that kind of data in the form of audio books and the work of Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. Sure, it isn't chunked into sentences, but since you have all of the source text you could do a quite reasonable job automating the slicing, throw out places you aren't sure, and still have a near infinite amount of great data. (Note that it…

Perhaps that's one of the points of using text from books. You can compare how people are speaking compared to someone who was specifically tasked with reading the book out loud for the audio book.

Re: Project Common Voice

#39

Post by lucb1e »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #10
pebers wrote: post #8

Is the data going to be freely available as well? It's a little unclear whether they intend to make it separately available or not.

It looks like the database will be open sourced later this year: https://voice.mozilla.org/faq I'm wondering if the format will be easily translatable to the kinds of models that software like CMUSphinx and Julius use https://cmusphinx.github.io/ http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php

It's weird to me that they publish the project about having an open dataset of voice data, with only a promise the open it up later.
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