Weekly Update Thread 2023

Common Voice
#1

Hello! It’s a new(ish) year, weekly updates are back and we’re so excited to be bringing you all the Common Voice news:

From the community:

From the team:

MozFest Panel Discussion: Breaking the Anglocentricism of the Internet - Perspectives from the Common Voice Community

Date and Time: 03-21, 15:00–16:00 (Europe/Amsterdam),

Join a panel of Common Voice community members as they tackle a call for greater diversity, inclusivity, and representation on the Internet to create a more equitable global digital community. Be part of the conversation as they share their lived experiences of the Anglocentric digital world. In addition to their ongoing efforts to dismantle Anglocentrism, we hope that the panel discussion will provide feasible solutions that will contribute to the creation of an inclusive digital community that accurately reflects the diverse linguistic and cultural communities across the globe.

Governance & Algorithmic Design in Speech AI - with Mozilla Common Voice and NVIDIA

03-21, 16:00–17:00 (Europe/Amsterdam),

Technologists and curious practitioners are welcomed to hear a talk about how governance considerations can be baked into every stage of building a speech recognition algorith - from data collection through to model testing. There will be several interactive scenarios for workshopping together.

:wave: That’s it for this week.

Did this update miss something important? Are you doing something cool we can help you show off? Reply to this thread, message Gina or myself, chat to us on Matrix or email commonvoice@mozilla.com to let us know about it, or just say hello!

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#2

Thanks Jess, great to have weekly updates back

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#3

It’s time for your weekly update from the Common Voice team! As always, if you’re doing something cool that we missed (or have something coming up we can show off for you) just reply and let us know!

Tomorrow, online: Our East African language communities have been doing incredible work, with a focus on Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili and Luganda. You can come learn about their successes at 4pm EAT by signing up for Creating community-driven datasets: Insights from Mozilla Common Voice activities in East Africa.

Call for presenters: Are you an academic working in or with under-resourced languages? RESOURCEFUL 2023 is seeking submissions for speakers working in this space for their conference May 22-24th in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. They’re looking for submissions of either 4-8 pages and you can learn more about the CFP and the conference itself here.

IRL in South Africa: Launch of “Voices of Mzansi” project workshop on behalf of GIZ’s Fair Forward project and Stellenbosch University. This project aims to localise the South African languages on Mozilla’s Common Voice platform and collect voice data that is open and accessible for everyone. The workshop will be at the CSIR International Convention Centre on 16 March 2023 @ 08.30. We’ll add more details as we find them!

Over at the Mozilla Corporation: The Mozilla community call on March 9th will be looking at how Firefox handles machine translations with privacy in mind. This might be of interest to those of you (most of you?) excited about languages and translation technologies. And the presenter, André Natal was involved in the early days of the Common Voice Project. Catch it when it goes live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06koBcfm5w

:wave: That’s it for this week.

Did this update miss something important? Are you doing something cool we can help you show off? Reply to this thread, message Gina or myself, chat to us on Matrix or email commonvoice@mozilla.com to let us know about it, or just say hello!

#4

It’s time for another weekly update!

Common Voice at Mozfest

Want a refresher on the basics of what Common Voice is? Here’s an overview of the project focused on our Tamil language community!

@Gina_Moape is running a really exciting session on Breaking the anglocentricism of the internet - perspectives from the Common Voice community

And I’ll be putting together a holistic look ast the governance and design principles behind each stage of the Speech AI lifecycle: Governance & Algorithmic Design in Speech AI - with Mozilla Common Voice and NVIDIA

The Funder’s Track for Mozfest is also doing some exciting things, I would encourage you to check it out and share with your contacts if it’s of interest!

Speaking of presentations, @stergro recently spoke at an Open Data Day in Karlsruhe and wanted to share his thoughts (and slides!)

The Sentence Collector is changing
We’re bringing the Sentence Collector into the Common Voice platform more neatly in this upcoming release, more details can be found in this post

Dataset 13.0 is coming
We’re working on the release of the freshest Common Voice data in the new dataset. We’ll be updating you shortly (later today!) with more details

Did we miss something?
Reply to this thread or message Jess or Gina if we can be bragging about the cool things you’re doing with Common Voice!

1 Like
#5

Thanks for the update and your mention of my slides! Maybe its worth pinning this thread on top of the forum like the old one?

Quite ironic how the talk about anglocentrism is presented haha:

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#6

You stole part of my speech :slight_smile:

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#7

It’s time for your weekly update from the Common Voice team! :tada:

MozFest Recap: Last week marked the occurrence of MozFest 2023, an event that stresses the importance of creating a fair and inclusive internet accessible to all. This year, the festival saw a participation of over 6,000 volunteers, facilitators, wranglers and active participants from various corners of the globe. The festival featured insightful discussions, interactive sessions on art, music and food, and meaningful exchanges of ideas among the attendees. We extend our gratitude to the members of the community who played vital roles as attendees and panelists at the MozFest. “The festival serves as a unique platform that brings together two seemingly different groups - tech experts and human rights activists” one of the speakers highlighted. At its core, MozFest is about people and community. We hope that you had the opportunity to be part of this incredible experience and enjoyed it. In case you were unable to attend the event and wish to revisit some of the sessions, you can visit the MozFest website to access recorded sessions.

Data Science for Health in Africa Virtual Networking Exchange on 3 May 2020: An opportunity to attend Virtual Networking Exchange on 3 May 2023 to meet and interact with organizations working on data science and health in Africa! During this completely online event, you will learn about exciting work happening across the continent, share information about your work, and identify potential collaborators. The Networking Exchange is completely free and open to any organization working on data science and/or health in Africa.

How to Participate: To participate, you may register as a participant or as a presenter.

  • Participants may join the event and move around between different Zoom rooms to learn about different data science and health organizations.
  • Presenters may represent their organization on the agenda for the event. They will have a Zoom breakout room for an allotted time during which they can share information about their organization and interact with participants.

More information on the Virtual Networking Exchange and registration is available on the DS-I Africa website

Note: The deadline to register as a presenter is 14 April 2023. There are a limited number of presenter slots available so please register as soon as possible.

Uzbek AI: The Uzbekvoice.ai team has collected about 1400 hours of high-quality audio recordings with accompanying texts to create a valuable resource for the Uzbek language. Common Voice recognizes, commends, and appreciates the team’s dedication to building open and accessible resources for language technology. Read more about it and get in contact with the team here: Uzbekvoice.ai Project.

Did this update miss something important? Are you doing something cool that we can help you show off? Reply to this thread, message Jess or myself or chat to us on Matrix:)

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