It would be useful to collect data from non-native speakers of a language. More and more such individuals are appearing in all countries, and devices that accept spoken words should not break because of someone's level of command of a spoken language. For example, a Swiss speaking German (Hochdeutsch), or more clearly, a Brit speaking French, etc. Some children who grow up in multi-lingual families also intermix words from multiple languages into their sentences. We can still understand them.
Project Common Voice
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Project Common Voice
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! Part of the goals of Common Voice is to make voice recognition work better for non-north american men (which is where the vast majority of the training data comes from). If you are a non-native speaker, we need your voice!
Okay but what should strangers submit for country and accent in the form ? The only options are anglophones countries.
Good question. Sounds like we should add an "Other" to that drop down, and make it clear that we are looking for all accents?
Re: Project Common Voice
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! Part of the goals of Common Voice is to make voice recognition work better for non-north american men (which is where the vast majority of the training data comes from). If you are a non-native speaker, we need your voice!
Okay but what should strangers submit for country and accent in the form ? The only options are anglophones countries.
The accent you think you are speaking (or are emulating)
Re: Project Common Voice
#54The 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…
I can tell from your comment (and it's responses) that the language on our homepage is a bit confusing, so thank you for the feedback. To answer you question: Common Voice is about building a collection of labelled voice data (ie. sentence clips w/ transcripts) that can be used to, for instance, train speech-to-text algorithms. Part of the goals of this project though is to figure out how this data can best help peop…
Very interesting. I was not aware that there is Mozilla DeepSpeech (which implements the model from the same called paper DeepSpeech by Baidu, in TensorFlow). Note that the issue with DeepSpeech (the CTC model from the Baidu paper) is that it really needs a lot of training data to perform well (that is a generic property of CTC). If you use more conventional models (hybrid NN/HMM models), you can get very decent word-error-rate performance with only a few hundred hours of data. The advantage of DeepSpeech of course is that it is simpler and you don't need a lexicon (mapping words to its pronunciations, i.e. sequence of phonemes).
I would also not use voice technology as the generic term for speech recognition, text-to-speech, and whatever else you want to do with this data. Rather, speech technology is the common term to cover all of this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_technology).
Re: Project Common Voice
#55Should i have any privacy concerns with contributing? I dont want just anyone to have the data to recreate my voice digitally.
Re: Project Common Voice
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay but what should strangers submit for country and accent in the form ? The only options are anglophones countries.
Good question. Sounds like we should add an "Other" to that drop down, and make it clear that we are looking for all accents?
Yes - imho "non native english speaker" would be we the field where I would look first- edit typed on phone ...
Re: Project Common Voice
#57It would be useful to collect data from non-native speakers of a language. More and more such individuals are appearing in all countries, and devices that accept spoken words should not break because of someone's level of command of a spoken language. For example, a Swiss speaking German (Hochdeutsch), or more clearly, a Brit speaking French, etc. Some children who grow up in multi-lingual families also intermix word…
This is a bug with our website [1]. We actually are trying to collect non-native speakers (as well as native). We are looking into clarifying this on the site.
Re: Project Common Voice
#58Man, most people have horrible microphones.
Indeed, and a big problem for STT models, which is why we're trying to collect this type of data.
Re: Project Common Voice
#59If they're planning to make a voice recognition system, why are they using example statements that are clearly taken from novels? [0] That's not how real people talk. They use a lot more slang, a lot more stopping and starting, filler words, etc. Instead you have people saying things like "irresolute", "rumbling", and other complex words. It would be useful for training a novel dictation system, but it's not how peop…
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…
That's correct. There isn't a good open dataset for that type of material. Perhaps we should try to build one.
Re: Project Common Voice
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can tell from your comment (and it's responses) that the language on our homepage is a bit confusing, so thank you for the feedback. To answer you question: Common Voice is about building a collection of labelled voice data (ie. sentence clips w/ transcripts) that can be used to, for instance, train speech-to-text algorithms. Part of the goals of this project though is to figure out how this data can best help peop…
Very interesting. I was not aware that there is Mozilla DeepSpeech (which implements the model from the same called paper DeepSpeech by Baidu, in TensorFlow). Note that the issue with DeepSpeech (the CTC model from the Baidu paper) is that it really needs a lot of training data to perform well (that is a generic property of CTC). If you use more conventional models (hybrid NN/HMM models), you can get very decent word…
Noted. Again thanks for the feedback :)