Hi Everyone,
Today I’m thrilled to share this announcement of a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GIZ, FCDO and Mozilla which will focus on building and growing a Kiswahili data set.
As a part of this work, we’ve onboarded new colleagues to the Common Voice team including: Chenai Chair, Special Advisor on Africa; Kathleen Siminyu, Machine Learning Fellow; and two Community Fellows, Rebecca Ryakitimbo Mwimbi and Britone Mwasaru.
Here is an excerpt from the press release:
“To help ensure that people everywhere benefit from this massive technological shift, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH (German Development Cooperation), and the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) are investing $3.4 million in Mozilla Common Voice. It’s part of an ambitious, open-source initiative to build out voice data sets in Kiswahili, an East African language spoken by an estimated 100 million people in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan.”
If you have any questions about the partnership or about our Kiswahili work, please reach out to Chenai Chair.