Weekly Update Thread 2023

Common Voice
#42

Hello Everyone :smiley:

Welcome back to another weekly update from the Common Voice community team

Common Voice ‘Wanawake Mashujaa’ Writing Competition: On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2023, Common Voice launched the “Wanawake Mashujaa’’ Competition, Kiswahili for “Brave Women” and called for written biographies of extraordinary women in local communities across Tanzania, Kenya, and the DRC. The competition lead, Mozilla Fellow Rebecca Ryakitimbo alluded that the written essays expand Common Voice’s repository in an inclusive way, through identifying and celebrating underrepresented women in AI training datasets. Winning entries span Eastern and Central African countries, winners were announced last week on October 18, 2023, here is more information on the competition and winners.

Participatory and Inclusive Data Stewardship - Where Next?: The ESRC Digital Good Network, Ada Lovelace Institute and Liverpool Civic Data Cooperative are hosting an Inclusive Data Stewardship event tomorrow the October 26, 2023 for 1 hour. The event will explore approaches that actively involve and include people in the governance and use of their own data. Secure your free ticket here.

Did this update miss something important? Are you doing something cool that we can help you show off? Reply to this thread, message @jesslynnrose or myself @Gina_Moape or say hello on Matrix or email commonvoice@mozilla.com and we’ll include you in the next update.

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#43

Welcome back to the weekly update from the Common Voice Community team. :dancer:

This week’s update is dedicated to our community members and collaborators who are doing amazing work in the Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing space.

@kathyreid authored a remarkable paper titled Common Voice and Accent Choice: Data Contributors Self-Describe Their Spoken Accents in Diverse Ways which earned an award from the conference organizers. Congratulations to Kathy for this outstanding achievement!

@bozden delivered a presentation at the 2023 Turkic Wikimedia Conference. The lecture centered around the Mozilla Common Voice project and delved into concepts and challenges related to culture, language, and speech within the context of voice-AI, approached from a computational linguistics perspective. Additionally, the presentation introduced topics such as responsive AI, bias in AI, and the cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions of artificial intelligence.

Thank you Kathy and Bülent for the outstanding work you both do.

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 @Gina_Moape or say hello on Matrix or email commonvoice@mozilla.com and we’ll include you in the next update.

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#44

Hi Community :dancer:

Welcome back to the weekly update from the Common Voice Community team.

A BIG BIG congratulations to Kathy Reid: Our colleague Kathy Reid successfully defended her PhD today at the ANU College of Engineering, Computing & Cybernetics. She presented her research design, methods, findings, and results during her presentation. Congratulations once again on this significant achievement.

Common Voice in Large ASR related models : Common Voice was part of the data used for evaluating Whisper large-v3 and large-v2 models. We are steadily progressing towards accomplishing our objective, which is to ensure the inclusion of all languages in voice technology language models.

Thank you to the communities for the ongoing dedication.

Did this update miss something important? Are you doing something cool that we can help you show off? Reply to this thread, message @jesslynnrose or myself @Gina_Moape or say hello on Matrix or email commonvoice@mozilla.com and we’ll include you in the next update.

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#45

Congrats @kathyreid !

Nice to see they used CV latest ones again. Now we have a new baseline to compare our fine-tunings!
Only if I could train those large models locally :frowning:

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#46

Hi Community :dancing_men:

Welcome back to the weekly update from the Common Voice Community team.

Common Voice on IRL Podcast: Common Voice took center stage in the latest In Real Life (IRL) podcast episode, the CV team @kat , along with others, shared their insights and experiences on voice datasets, languages, and AI, with @jess and @rebeccar headlining the listening party with the Mozfest community in Discord.

Dive into the details of this engaging discussion by listening to the podcast episode at IRL Podcast Episode 4.

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 @Gina_Moape or say hello on Matrix or email commonvoice@mozilla.com and we’ll include you in the next update.

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