Technology

60109 readers

1864 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

124

Common Voice - Donate your voice to teach machines how people speak | Mozilla (commonvoice.mozilla.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's frustrating when you're not understood — especially when you're trying to speak to Siri, Alexa, or another internet-connected device.

Voice datasets that power voice recognition services are owned by a handful of major companies, and they can wildly underrepresent the voices of non-dominant accents, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, disabled people and gender marginalised people. In fact, for people speaking other global languages - there may be no datasets at all.

That’s why Mozilla launched Common Voice — the world's largest public voice database, powered by the voices of volunteer contributors. Our goal is to teach machines how real people speak.

Today, we’re asking you to contribute to Common Voice, but we want you to choose how you’ll do it. Will you donate your voice to one of our Common Voice language datasets? Or will you make a $34 donation to Mozilla to support projects like this to reclaim the internet? (Or both!)

I'd be curious about the privacy concerns, but this might help a lot with underrepresented voice data. It might come down to if someone wants more datasets for their particular voice/language more than the other concerns.

If your language/accent is already well documented, it might not help as much?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Technically there are different dialects and a lot of unique slang, idioms and specific descriptive words.

In the trans and non-binary community for instance there's a lot of terms regarding how people identify and express themselves that unless you know the actual function of how they work aren't easily indistinguishable from slurs to outsiders. Take "Femboy" and (please forgive me mods) "Shemale". The former is a perfectly socially acceptable description of a guy (cis or otherwise) whose gender expression is very feminine...the latter is a slur that places emphasis on the birth sex characteristics of a trans woman and implies heavily they are guys just pretending to be women and the term originates from the porn industry that fetishizes trans women.

You also have the usage of neo-pronouns. In languages with more gendered components than English sometimes what words are chosen either reflects the gender of the speaker or the person being addressed or objects can be given a gendered connotation. Some languages are actually very gendered and the usage non-binary folk using those languages make whole new conventions. English speakers whine a remarkable amount over they/them singular pronouns are confusing but ain't seen nothing. A lot of places your job title and status has no neutral gendered term or culturally there are sentence structures that differ down entirely binary gender lines. Are you latino or latina? Guess we need a new word... Latinx!