Project Common Voice

The terminology is a bit confusing. They are saying that they want to build voice recognition but it seems like they actually might want to build a speech recognition engine. Speech recognition is about recognizing the speech, the spoken words. Voice recognition is about recognizing the speakers voice, i.e. identifying the speaker. Also, maybe they also want to build a text-to-speech (TTS) system but I'm not sure. No matter what, the collected data might be useful for all of that…

The goal of making a large, publicly available training corpus for ASR is incredibly admirable, but this approach is problematic. People speak entirely differently when reading from a script. Models trained on read speech (like LibriSpeech) generally don't perform well on spontaneous speech test sets (like Switchboard). Transcribing speech that was read from a script isn't a particularly interesting problem. This effort would be more interesting if it could collect speech data in a more specific domain, like web…

The project is a great idea and an open source way to decentralize the diverse training speech record data which previously was available only with big corporations like Google, FB & Amazon. This open data repo created using the common voice project will help startups & researchers to create generalized speech recognition algorithms and compete with other big players. The project is truly an amazing initiative to promote the open innovation on the web. Hope all will participate and contribute…