Mozilla has announced that its Common Voice project has received $1.5 million from NVIDIA to help “transform the voice recognition landscape.” Mozilla Common Voice has been around for a couple of years so far and allows volunteers to contribute to a database for speech recognition software that’s in the public domain, available for everyone to use.
Accompanying today’s news, Mozilla has taken the decision to move Common Voice under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation and will make up part of the firm’s initiatives to make artificial intelligence more trustworthy. Common Voice has the ability to democratise voice technology development as existing voice data used to train algorithms is held by a few big companies whereas Common Voice is open for all to use.
Speaking about the investment, Kari Briski, senior director of accelerated computing product management at NVIDIA said:
“The demand for conversational AI is growing, with chatbots and virtual assistants impacting nearly every industry. With Common Voice’s large and open datasets, we’re able to develop pre-trained models and offer them back to the community for free. Together, we’re working toward a shared goal of supporting and building communities — particularly for under-resourced and under-served languages.”
Mozilla said that NVIDIA’s investment will accelerate the growth of Common Voice by engaging more communities and volunteers in the project. The money will also help Mozilla hire new staff to improve and promote Common Voice which will result in better data.