Mozilla Common Voice is the largest dataset that consists of thousands of hours of voice clips, in fifty different languages. Mozilla is planning to transform the voice technology ecosystem by releasing its own voice assistant.
The Common Voice dataset is set to contribute to the birth of ‘Firefox voice’, and with the data gathered we cannot help but think the huge surprise we’re in for soon.
What is Mozilla Common Voice?
Mozilla released the largest public dataset of human voices available for use last year. Mozilla Firefox is a popular, open-source web browser, used by millions today. The dataset encompassed 1400 hours of recorded voice clips, in about 18 different languages in 2019.
It has now grown to a whopping set of 7226 hours of recorded voice clips, in about 54 different languages. It has a total of 5.5 million clips! The collected data is supposed to be used with Mozilla’s Deep Speech toolkit, which recently had a huge update.
It now supports and recognizes Google’s TensorFlow Lite framework.
So why did Mozilla come up with Common Voice?
Mozilla Common Voice includes languages such as Chinese, Welsh, Mandarin, French, German, English, Kabyle, etc. It has an option where it lets users add their name, sex, accent, and so forth.
The dataset flaunts massive diversity, with a parade of people belonging to different parts of the world contributing their voice clips to it.
Mozilla has successfully built an expansive empire that solely propagates the growth of voice technology. With all these voice clips, Mozilla aims to contribute to the voice technology ecosystem for further development. The Mozilla team stated that as for Common Voice, their focus in 2018 was to build out the concept, make it a tool for any language community to use, optimize the website, and build a robust backend. They also said that their overall aim remains: Providing more and better data to everyone in the world who seeks to build and use voice technology”.
What is Voice Browse?
Mozilla Firefox is planning to release a feature that will let users assess voice control over the browser. It is currently in its beta mode and is added to the browser like an extension known as ‘Firefox Voice.’
The smart voice assistant only understands basic commands as of now, and can only comprehend statements spoken in English. However, this huge dataset will aid its functionality and versatility in the near future.
Firefox uses Google Cloud Speech, but Mozilla has plans to switch to an in-house server itself.
Future of Common Voice
Google decided to release a voice assistant feature for its own browser, but managed to exceed its own expectations with Google Assistant itself. With Mozilla launching its own voice feature, we can’t deny that Mozilla and Google are in for a tough competition.
Both are promising contenders, and both keep taking the voice technology ecosystem to newer heights. However, Mozilla Common Voice might have the upper hand- with the largest data set flaunting a massive diversity, we can only imagine how convenient and quick the final result is going to be.
