Common Voice: Weekly Update 18th June 2021

Common Voice
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Common Voice: Weekly Update 18th June

Hey Common Voice Community,

This is the first of the new Common Voice weekly updates!
We want this to be a space for us to openly communicate with everyone.

We are hiring!

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to support stable, reliable infrastructure across Mozilla Foundation, with a particular role in supporting Common Voice (CV).

PS. we will be growing the team with more Common Voice engineers soon, so keep your eyes open!

New outreach campaign for voice contributions.

We want to support Common Voice to grow - in the next few weeks, we will be promoting the project on social media, using videos and images to explain to people why voice matters. We will share a sneak preview with you all before it launches - let us know what you think! We’d also love to hear - and support - ideas you have for future Common Voice campaigns in your communities!

All the best,
:sparkles:

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Weekly Update Thread - 2021-2022
Common Voice: Weekly Update 26th July
Campaign videos uploaded to Amara for subtitling
#2

Hi, when are these videos available? will it be translated to other languages?

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#3

Sayın @neouyghur, I’m sure that when the videos are made they will be advertised here. I leave it up to the Mozilla folks to decide if they should be translated. Ama bence çok iyi bir fikirdir. :smiley:

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#4

Hey :wave:t6:

Thanks for your question

The videos will be translated in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian for the June outreach campaign for voice contributions. The videos should be available this week, ahead of the campaign.

Kind regards,

Hillary

#5

@heyhillary will it be possible for the community to provide translations in other languages? e.g. maybe subtitles? It would be great to have them in Swahili and Guaraní so for the communities there it isn’t just in the language of their European “partners” :smiley:

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#6

I second the question. This (underrepresented languages) is one of the areas where Common Voice really shines, often being the only or one of the few available speech datasets.

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#7

There is a tool/service called Amara that we used to crowd-sourcing subtitles on hundreds of Mozilla videos. Welcome to join the team - https://amara.org/teams/mozilla/ (Telegram group)

Once the above video gets published, I will upload it to Amara, and we can start working on creating subtitles in other languages. Once the staff had time, they can download the result srt files, and add them back to the video on youtube or other platforms.

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#8

I hope we will also have editable files for those images. We can create localization version to use in the local channel. It could be really fun to see those marketing materials been translated and shred in different places.

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#9

Hey @ftyers , @comodoro , @irvin

You’re absolutely right to ask about making the voice contribution marketing campaign accessible in underrepresented languages! That’s really what we want to get to. This is the first of many marketing campaigns! We plan on replicating these kinds of efforts in other languages to support all communities within Common Voice. Localisable resources (videos, images, playbooks, kits) are already a top priority for the next few months, so watch this space!

The June/July marketing campaign videos include shots of individual people talking in their own languages about their own voices being heard. In some contexts, it might be inappropriate to layer certain languages on top of particular demographics. We want to be sensitive and authentic in our approach.

We really welcome more suggestions of what support would be helpful for your own contexts!

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#10

It would be great if those people could come from a diverse set of communities speaking a diverse set of languages, not all from the global north. I can send you some suggestions of people to contact by Matrix :slight_smile:

Also, why not put out a call for participation from the community, I’m sure a lot of people who would be interested in recording a video and participating! That would be the best way (imo) to get authentic materials.

How are you planning to choose the people and languages who will make videos?

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#11

Hi @ftyers that would be great. TeĹźekkĂĽr ederim. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Till now, we got more than 200 contributors for the Uyghur language. However, we have not got new contributors recently. These official videos might be helpful for it.

#12

Hey @ftyers and @neouyghur

We are definitely on the same page! This is our first experiment with an advertising campaign to drive voice donations. The wider strategy we’re working on - and that lots of you have contributed to through your interviews and live chats with me and @Em.Lewis-Jong - is designed to support ALL languages to grow and thrive on Common Voice!

We’ve been playing with lots of ideas that we’ll be bringing to you all soon for input and participation - including Twitter takeovers of Mozfest by you all, homemade videos, comms opportunities, playbooks and localisable animations and visuals. Please bear with us as we ramp back up after all the recent hiring :slight_smile: And as we mentioned - we always want more ideas for your own context!

Keep an eye open for the Weekly Update on Friday as there is going to be a call for contributions on Mozilla Festival Twitter Community Fridays, taking place on the 9th of July. Osman if you would like to take part, I’m happy to follow up with you :slight_smile: As always - thank you for everything you do! :sparkles:

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#13

Have you considered publishing the source-files of the videos or a version of the video without text and voice-over? This would help small languages to create videos for their campaigns without additional work for the marketing team. Having good changeable promotion material always helps a lot. For example, it was very helpful to have the editable PowerPoint files of the English slides about the project.

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#14

Hey @stergro

Thanks for your suggestion.

At the moment, we will be sharing editable static image files from the campaign. As these videos include shots of individual people talking in their own languages about their own voices being heard.

We are looking into how we can create an editable pack that enables language communities to create videos such as the ones featured in the campaign.

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#15

Also just to add: Here’s the thread to the localisable static images from the campaign Marketing Campaign update: Localisable static images

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