Hi Megan,
that’s a sad decision. In my modest opinion, that I’m just a supporter, it’s a wrong path, sorry.
In part I understand your points, but in, Common Voice project in general, I see too much rejections to contributors (developers in this case) that try to support the community and the beautiful CV project.
I decided to comment here not just because the specific Saverio’s app story (to which goes my absolute solidarity, I’m sure about his positive and proactive intent and realization), but because some minor facts I experienced myself last fall.
By example in past I raised in this forum some perplexities regarding:
gender bias (statistics are impressive with just 19% of women contribution)
age bias (people with age < 19 years old not allowed)
bad words censorship
I didn’t see pretty any feedback in community forum ( a part the remind of mandatory respect of USA regulations). Right, but isn’t CV an international project in the general/long vision terms?
Are the topics above mentioned minor points for the CV project ? I don’t think so if, since many years, we talk so much about data feed (in this case spoken languages) bias in current machine learning tech.
Another minor fact: I commented an issue on Github, just agreeing on the request of ready to use DeepSpeech foreign (italian in my case) language models. My request has considered out of scope and has been defined ‘insinuating’ and the issue has been closed abruptly. Is this the way to reply to such a request?
Don’t you want to spread DeeSpeech creating developers engagement? Is really your suggested path to use DeepSpeech with mandatory dataset retraining?
Is that your meaning of engagement?
Again, see what happened with the third party developer telegram bot (Daniele reminded) and the lack of Common Voice official API (another mystery/shutdown).
Sincerely I’m really perplexed and I do not understand Mozilla CV long term strategy. It seems to me very authoritative and “top down” approach. Something one could expect from Amazon, not from Mozilla.
Don’t Common Voice want to be an opensource / opendata REAL alternative to big players wallet gardens?
I don’t understand these continue “closures”.
Very sad.
Giorgio