Common Voice Contribute-a-thon

The Mozilla Foundation is organizing Mozilla Festival (MozFest) 2021 virtually from 08 March 2021 with the main theme of “Trustworthy AI”. Leading up to the festival, Campus Fryslân and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences together with the Mozilla Foundation are organising the Common Voice Contribute-a-thon, and you can join!

Live Opening event

On Friday 15 January at 3 PM (15:00 CET, 09:00 ET, 14:00 GMT) we will kick off the Contribute-a-thon with an opening event:

- Lecture 1: Josh Meyer (Common Voice Fellow)
Community activation for voice technology
- Lecture 2: Nanda Piersma (Hogeschool van Amsterdam)
Speech research of Dutch and the role of resources like Common Voice

Audience members are able to submit their questions ahead of time by tweeting with the hashtag #CVChallenge.

Join the livestream on Mozilla
Join the livestream on YouTube

Live Closing event

On Friday 22 January at 3 PM (15:00 CET, 09:00 ET, 14:00 GMT) we will end the Contribute-a-thon week by organising a panel discussion:

Theme: Panel discussion on voice technology for minoritized languages
Panelists:

Dr. Esther Klabbers - Research Scientist at ReadSpeaker
Dr. Jelske Dijkstra - Researcher Voice Technology at University of Groningen (Campus Fryslân)
Daan van Esch - Internationalization for Language Technology at Google

Moderators:

Dr. Matt Coler - Director of Voice Technology MSc. & Associate Professor of Language & Tech at University of Groningen (Campus Fryslân)
Tan Phat Do - Doctoral Researcher at University of Groningen (Campus Fryslân)

Audience members are able to submit their questions ahead of time by tweeting with the hashtag #CVChallenge.

Join the livestream on Mozilla
Join the livestream on YouTube

Contribute-a-thon Challenge

Friday, January 15th, 2021 16:00 CET - Friday, January 22nd, 2021 16:00 CET

The challenge progress can be viewed in real-time at this dashboard! You yourself can contribute to speech research on Dutch and Frisian!

Common Voice Contribute-a-thon Voice Challenge

Do you speak Dutch or Frisian? If so, you are invited to contribute your voice between 15 and 22 January '21! Mozilla Common Voice is organizing a Voice Challenge between the Dutch and Frisian languages. The language that has more recordings and validations after one week wins.

Wondering how you can be of help? By recording yourself reading given sentences out loud and helping validating others' contributions (by listening to and judging others' recordings) in the open-source Common Voice dataset, which is very popular among the research community of voice/speech technology. Afterwards, by sending a screenshot of the Stats tab in your Common Voice profile (in which your username is also visible) to commonvoicechallenge gmail.com, you can get a cool sticker from the event!

Common Voice, HvA and UG
The aim of the challenge is to collect as much audio as possible. The Challenge is organized by Mozilla, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and the University of Groningen. Students from these two Dutch educational institutions research speech technology in the new MSc Voice Technology (UG) and devise and make innovative applications for speech in the Minor Conversational Interface (HvA). You too can support the Dutch and Frisian languages and Mozilla Common Voice by recording/validating as many sentences as you can in this event.

Common Voice
Common Voice is part of Mozilla's initiative to help teach machines how real people speak. In addition to the Common Voice dataset, Mozilla is also building an open source speech recognition engine called Deep Speech. Both of these projects are part of our efforts to bridge the digital speech divide. Voice recognition technologies bring a human dimension to our devices, but developers need an enormous amount of voice data to build them. By donating your voice you're helping out developers and researchers all over the world. Together we can make voice recognition better for everyone!

Culture, Language & Technology

Campus Fryslân's Culture, Language & Technology Flagship comprises a team of researchers and scientists dedicated to exploring how Human, Social and Behavioural Science-lead research can have a regional impact. The Flagship has two research themes:

Minoritized languages and multilingualism: We research Frisian, Dutch and other minority cultures, languages and multilingual interactions.
Voice and speech technologies: We research voice and speech technologies, not only investigating technological components, but also social and cultural issues (e.g. how technology is used, by whom, and for what purposes).

Voice Technology MSc

We are very proud of the fact that in September 2021 the first group of students will start our brand new Voice Technology MSc programme!

This Master’s programme is one-of-its-kind. No other Master’s programme in continental Europe is dedicated exclusively to Voice Technology. No matter if your Bachelor’s degree is in linguistics, computer science, engineering, digital humanities, or something else altogether, if you are interested in voice technology and aren’t afraid of exploring new terrain, then this is the programme for you.