Hello 
Everyone - it’s been a while since the last update but I promise you will be excited by this one!
We are hiring!
Are you interested in joining the Common Voice team as an engineer?
We are looking for two engineers to join us; Front-end and Full Stack. to be based in either United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Germany
All the best with applications.
Making videos accessible with translation
As part of Mozfest, Hyper-audio partnered with contributors to make their videos more accessible to people who don’t speak languages such as English.
Mark from Hyper-audio has written a fantastic blog explaining the process. I’ve enjoyed working with Mark to enable Common Voice Mozfest Session’s subtitles to be available in Catalan, Tagalog, Swahili, Turkish, French and Azberjani.
You can access the video via this link.
Next Community Workshop!
On the 31st May, 2pm UTC+1 (See your timezone), you are invited to join me and the Kiswahili Fellows, Rebecca and Kathleen to reflect on the question: How can we be informed by data feminist principles when organising to break the bias within Voice Technology?
Secure your spot today and please share !
See us at Re:Publica, Berlin
Next month we are hosting a creative workshop at RE: Publica called “Speak up! Exploring Decentralised Voice Assistant Futures through Speculative Design”
The workshop seeks to integrate the use of data in voice assistants through speculative design. If you are based in Berlin, consider visiting us we would love to meet you!
Quick Updates and Look Ahead
Model Competition has been postponed to July
- To coincide with the V10 of Common Voice Dataset. Further details will be shared with the community.
Launching a language on Common Voice
- In the next code release, we will be reducing the localisation rate for languages to 60%. We would like to encourage the community to prioritise localising key pages such as speak, listen, terms and privacy policy pages.
Congratulations to the winners of the Kiswahili writing competition
- Learn more about the winning entries via our blog.
Applications for Common Voice Language Reps
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The formal application window has closed but for languages currently.
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We received applications from the following languages; Tagalog, Corsican, Azerbaijani, Danish, Italian, English, Welsh, Bengali, Sakha, Bassa, Taiwanese, Swahili, Thai, Kabyle, Turkish, Dutch, Frisian and Abkhaz.
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For languages without applicants but interested contributors, please send me an email before 27th May to be considered as part of the next cohort of language reps. Our first session will be in June on Community Vision Planning