Common Voice Sprint — Vadodara

Common Voice is Mozilla’s initiative to help teach machines how real people speak.
Voice is natural, voice is human. That’s why we’re excited about creating usable voice technology for our machines. But to create voice systems, developers need an extremely large amount of voice data.

Most of the data used by large companies aren’t available to the majority of people. We think that stifles innovation. So we’ve launched Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open and accessible to everyone.

Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice database that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web. Read a sentence to help machines learn how real people speak. Check the work of other contributors to improve the quality. It’s that simple!

Rep’s Event Page:
https://reps.mozilla.org/e/common-voice-sprint-1/

DATE & TIME:
May 04, 2019–1200 to 1700 Hours.

VENUE:
Yuvalay eLab, Vadodara

ATTENDANCE: 7 People

PERSONAL NOTE:
Common Voice is something which is close to us as humans in many ways. I believe that since technology is moving closer to what do we do with our primary senses, we need more responsible and more ethical ways of using it. I believe in Mozilla and so do millions of people all around the world. We are not restricted to anything — possibilities are endless with what we can do with the things which fit in the palm of our hand and how do we plan to use it? More so, how do the big tech companies plan to use it? We, as a part of the system, are not contributing but affected the most. This was our time to do something about it and we were about to contribute to building high quality, publicly open dataset. ❤

THE EVENT:
We met at the venue and sat around to first understand what Common Voice is, and Why do we contribute to it. We sat around and talked about existing APIs for Voice, it’s data and the consent that is needed to use your voice to train someone else’s dataset. We moved on to understanding the simple and amazing platform that Common Voice has. After that, we started Contributing!

We broke for lunch at around two and had some delicious subs along with Coke and Cookies. We talked for about an hour and a half about technology and responsible technology and how we cannot hold anyone liable in India on technological mishaps based on Privacy since we don’t have a current Privacy Law. We then went up, and finished Listening to over 700 strings and 550 Validations.

That’s it for this one.

See you guys soon!

Peace. :D