Dear Common Voice Community,
Firstly, thank you everyone for your ongoing commitment and support for Common Voice. Without you all, our most recent goal of 9,000 released hours would not have been possible! You are the core of what makes Common Voice unique and impactful.
In August, 2020 we committed to sharing updates on the future of Common Voice. Since then, a small team across Mozilla’s Foundation and Corporation have been working tirelessly to secure a strong and stable future for the Common Voice platform, dataset and community. Our goal has been to find a home for the project and to build a set of strong relationships with funders and corporate partners who want to see Common Voice succeed. So, as we kick off a new year, we’re excited to share updates on the stewardship of the Common Voice project, which presents continued opportunities for growth of the community, the platform and the dataset.
In February, the stewardship of Common Voice will move from the Mozilla Corporation to the Mozilla Foundation (and we’re hiring for a few key roles, if you’re interested!). This will be a gradual transition. You likely won’t notice many changes to commonvoice.mozilla.org (though eventual feature improvements to the platform will commence again in the near term). Under the Foundation’s leadership, Common Voice will continue to pioneer voice data contribution and open datasets, whilst supporting and building communities, particularly for under resourced and under served languages. All of this fits squarely within the Foundation’s work of making AI more trustworthy and inclusive.
As we go through this transition, Common Voice will remain up and accessible, but there will be a period from mid February to early March, where there will not be immediate support available.
We have some other exciting partnership announcements in the works also, which we will be sharing with the community soon. Stay tuned!
As always, please reach out with any questions or thoughts. We are excited for this new phase for Common Voice!
Jane & Mark