Despite speech increasingly becoming one of the main ways people interact with devices, voice technology remains largely closed off to Africa’s languages, accents, and speech patterns.
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Despite speech becoming an important way humans interact with machines, voice technology remains largely closed off to Africa’s languages, accents, and speech patterns. Case in point: The world’s most popular voice assistants—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant—still don’t support any African languages.
Common Voice, a crowdsourcing project started by the open-source nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in 2017, has been addressing this by inviting African-language speakers to donate voices to a free and publicly available dataset that researchers and developers can use to train voice-enabled apps, products, and services.
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