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Common Voice

commonvoice.mozilla.org

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Re: Common Voice

#61

Post by jszymborski »

moron4hire wrote: post #51
pseudalopex wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_linguistics#Accents_of_En...

I'm aware of the trope. I've yet to meet anyone that adheres to it, though. Always thought it was just one of those things that Hollywood overemphasizes to "other" gay people.

GP linked you to a summary of a scientif finding, not a trope. You can read more about the study here [0].

Regardless, I think the point of collecting these stats is to make sure voices of people that might normally be under-represented in a uniform sample of a relatively small size can be corrected for. These are common stats to collect in surveys for similar reasons.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00954...

Re: Common Voice

#62

Post by ftyers »

yorwba wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: 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…

> Norwegian Bokmål ... is currently in progress. What's missing is a sufficiently complete translation of the UI https://pontoon.mozilla.org/projects/common-voice/ and a sufficiently large number of sentences for people to record https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/nb-NO/write > let each speaker at least assign a lot of tags/labels to their profile Common Voice data files have columns for age, gender, accents, variant, l…

Target segment was a was of including specific subdatasets. For example the digits dataset which was just the digits 0-9 and yes/no.

Re: Common Voice

#63

Post by ftyers »

vidarh wrote: 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…

> 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.

This is exactly what the freeform accent (actually "variant") field is. You can add as many tags as you like. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/how-we-are-making-com...

Re: Common Voice

#64

Post by charles_f »

pimlottc wrote: post #47

With recent events in AI and deepfake technology, I would need to see some assurances before I agreed to “donate my voice” to something like this. It seems like the project is for voice recognition, not generation, but it’s not immediately clear.

I don't know if assurances is the right term, but everything around machine learning and generation seems to be quite liberal with respecting people's property, so indeed something called "donate your voice" made me pause.

Mozilla is probably the right organization for that. Their main product however is dwindling, and I'm not sure what will happen to their data if they ceased to exist. There is a tendency for dying organizations to be pulled apart for scraps, and this would definitely become an IP of interest for a lot of companies with much lesser noble causes

Re: Common Voice

#65

Post by alacode »

sxp wrote: 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

Pretty cool, it printed a list of over 8000 on my machine (Ubuntu, well Kubuntu now) and then proceeded to speak the voices after printing them all.

Re: Common Voice

#66

Post by vidarh »

ftyers wrote: post #63
vidarh wrote: 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…

> 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 "lan…

Then the guidance on the site really needs to be updated, as that's not what the help in the profile section says, and starting to type the auto-completing options didn't really give reason to suspect that either.

Re: Common Voice

#67

Post by vidarh »

yorwba wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: 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…

> Norwegian Bokmål ... is currently in progress. What's missing is a sufficiently complete translation of the UI https://pontoon.mozilla.org/projects/common-voice/ and a sufficiently large number of sentences for people to record https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/nb-NO/write > let each speaker at least assign a lot of tags/labels to their profile Common Voice data files have columns for age, gender, accents, variant, l…

Weird to hold off on adding a language because the UI isn't translated. Why would there be an assumption that the language people want to record is linked to preferred UI language?

I don't want Norwegian UI - I just want to be able to record Norwegian sentences. If the UI switches to Norwegian I'd be very annoyed, as I haven't indicated I want that and my browser settings specify English.

(I avoid Norwegian for UIs, because the translations are generally wildly inconsistent in how they translate key terms that I'm used to seeing in English, so it's a massive nuisance - when people assume UI and content language should be the same, that is a major failing to me)

Re: tags someone else pointed out the accent field is being used for this, even though the UI describes that as specifically for accents.

Re: Common Voice

#68

Post by ftyers »

vidarh wrote: post #67
yorwba wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Norwegian Bokmål ... is currently in progress. What's missing is a sufficiently complete translation of the UI https://pontoon.mozilla.org/projects/common-voice/ and a sufficiently large number of sentences for people to record https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/nb-NO/write > let each speaker at least assign a lot of tags/labels to their profile Common Voice data files have columns for age, gender, accents, variant, l…

Weird to hold off on adding a language because the UI isn't translated. Why would there be an assumption that the language people want to record is linked to preferred UI language? I don't want Norwegian UI - I just want to be able to record Norwegian sentences. If the UI switches to Norwegian I'd be very annoyed, as I haven't indicated I want that and my browser settings specify English. (I avoid Norwegian for UIs,…

[comment removed]

Re: Common Voice

#69

Post by vidarh »

ftyers wrote: post #68
vidarh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to hold off on adding a language because the UI isn't translated. Why would there be an assumption that the language people want to record is linked to preferred UI language? I don't want Norwegian UI - I just want to be able to record Norwegian sentences. If the UI switches to Norwegian I'd be very annoyed, as I haven't indicated I want that and my browser settings specify English. (I avoid Norwegian for UIs,…

[comment removed]

Frankly this does seem like a massive barrier to me.

It's certainly causing me to lose interest, and I suspect it's driving away a lot of people, not least because it was not at all obvious to me there was some way of speeding up getting a language in the first place.

It was already off-putting not to be given a way to write sentences or record right away.

But now that I know, I have no interest in wasting time contributing to a UI translation I actively don't want to be subjected to, but would happily contribute recordings and sentences on occasion if the language was enabled because the potential for speech recognition and tts utility is entirely separate in value from UI.

This whole approach feels really backwards to me, and the really short list of languages no longer surprise me.

EDIT: I see I actually have had it bookmarked a long time, and presumably lost interest once before due to the lack of my language.

EDIT2: As much as the Norwegian UI is already annoying me and I've already spotted at least one spelling mistake in it, and one translation that is "correct" that thoroughly annoys me, I'll see if I can submit some sentences at least.

Re: Common Voice

#70

Post by contrarian1234 »

yorwba wrote: post #55
rasz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DeepSpeech is not competition for NVIDIA, quite the contrary. More people using DeepSpeech means more GPUs sold. Seems more likely that Mozilla would have shut down both projects, but NVIDIA funding saved the more important one.

Does speech to text require that much compute?

EDIT: Nvm, there seems to be a new project called Sayboard that does everything on your phone:

https://github.com/ElishaAz/Sayboard

(though switching from Swiftkey is a bit annoying)

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