Common Voice: Weekly Update 25th June 2021

Common Voice
#1

Common Voice: Weekly Update 25th June

Hey Common Voice Community, :wave:t6:

:partying_face: Dataset release

We are excited that the next dataset release will be around the end of July. Your amazing contributions and community mobilisation have enabled the project to get to 12,000+ hours! (This release is a substantial process, and contribution and validation after the 20th of July will be counted towards the dataset release after July.)

Watch this space! Roadmapping participation coming soon!

We are also going to be asking for input and feedback into the roadmap! More details will be coming in the next couple of weeks.

Follow up: New outreach campaign for voice contributions - Sneak Preview

As mentioned in last week’s weekly update, we will be running an Ad experiment for the next couple of weeks on social media, using videos and images to explain to people why voice matters.

The team is making some final touches, and we hope to share this with you early next week. Sorry for the delay.

We will also be sharing editable static image files if you’d like to make use of them for promoting your own language!

:postal_horn:Opportunity: MozFest Community Friday Twitter Takeover

On Friday 9th of July, we are taking over MozFest’s Twitter for Community Fridays.

Community Friday’s is an opportunity to ask engaging and conversational questions to the MozFest Twitter community over the course of 5-8 tweets.

Here are examples of previous community Fridays: Beyond AI Bias: Power, Rights and Questioning Inevitability by Vidushi Marada from Article 19

We believe that this would be an excellent opportunity to raise awareness of the need to make speech technology accessible to everyone and encourage people to contribute their voice ahead of the next dataset release.

If your language community is currently focusing on voice contributions and would like to take part in this Twitter take over please send me a direct message.

As always, we welcome your ideas for future Common Voice campaigns in your communities, please do message us!

:question:Community Question: Common Voice Platform and Low bandwidth connectivity

In our community members 1 to 1s, we have heard of some of your experiences of using the common voice platform in areas of low bandwidth connectivity. We want to understand how widespread this experience is.

Have you struggled to use the common voice platform in low bandwidth areas? Please share your experiences within the thread.

Building relationships

The Common Voice team is growing, and in these last two months, we have welcomed several new colleagues. Today we would like to highlight the team supporting the Kiswahili dataset.

Feel free to reach out to Chenai Chair, Special Advisor on Africa; Kathleen Siminyu 1, Machine Learning Fellow; and two Community Fellows, Rebecca Ryakitimbo Mwimbi 1 and Britone Mwasaru.

If you have questions on Common Voice, please feel free to reach out to me!

All the best :sparkles:,

Hillary, on behalf of the Common Voice Team

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Weekly Update Thread - 2021-2022
#2

Hi @heyhillary! Thanks for the update!

A question about the Community Fridays thing: I didn’t quite get the format, does it mean that people from Common Voice communities will ask questions (via tweets) and people from the wider Mozilla will answer? Or is it more like, wider Mozilla asks questions and the community participants answer? I took a look at the example bit it was still a bit unclear, sorry! :smiley:

#3

Hey, @ftyers your welcome.

No worries, happy to clarify.

We (Common voice communities) will draft 6-8 tweets that are posted on @MozillaFestival Twitter account. The tweets are a mixture of questions and promotions of Common Voice to engage the wider Mozilla community and people who follow MozFest Twitter account (9,000 + people).

MozFest " is a unique hybrid: part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world."

While the tweets will come from the @MozillaFestival handle, (that we have pre-created) we can engage with the discussion via our personal twitter accounts.

We don’t receive direct access to MozFest’s account (e.g passwords) and should not say that we are speaking for Mozilla. As the Community Fridays format is more of sharing and dialogue space of the MozFest participants. To note, similar to community participation guidelines that govern common voice channels, this is also applied for the community Fridays.

Hope this further detail helps. I’m happy to share with you and anyone else the teams briefing document on this.

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#4

Thanks for the clarification! I’d love to see the document :slight_smile: Is the idea that we draft the tweets together as a group or that everyone proposes a tweet and then they are voted on or decided on somehow? Do the tweets have to be in English or is the venue multilingual?

1 Like
#5

Hi,

it’s done good news, I look at all this and I contact you

Thanks

1 Like
#6

Hey Francis,

No worries, your welcome.

For the tweets, we will create an English version and tweets from specific community members who contribute can be in their language, with an English translation.

As Mozfest predominately tweets in English.