Language: English (mozilla)
For those of us who use English regularly, voice technologies can be a daily part of our lives. We set timers with Alexa, ask Siri for the weather, and make calendar events with Google Home. For those of us living with vision impairments, voice technologies allow us to be a part of a connected, digital world. We might listen to Wikipedia articles read by synthetic voices or send emails via dictation. If you speak English, you might think that this technology is the same as other apps you use, like Twitter or Slack. But, there’s a fundamental difference. For most of the world, people don’t get to use their native language to connect to a digital world. There exists a very tangible gap between languages with and languages without resources to develop voice tech. This gap is a political and economic divide, but as voice tech becomes more democratized and more Open we have the opportunity to create wonderful and necessary applications in more and more languages. The onus is on us to take the step and make the tech.
We can’t sit back and wait for Big Tech to make apps for the rest of the world’s languages. Let’s Hack the Planet! During this workshop, participants will develop applications of their choice incorporating Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech for the language(s) of their choice, using Coqui’s existing voice tech which has been trained using data from the Common Voice project.
Inspire people and enable them in creating voice applications for their languages.
Why did you choose that space? How does your session align with the space description?:We designed the session for Digitizing Cultures & Languages Space.
We wanted to equip people with the building of virtual tools rooted in the preservation of the world’s cultural and linguistic diversity.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session? What if 30 participants attend? What if there are 3?:Overall want to treat our participants with dignity and respect, ensuring that they are enabled in understanding the lightning talk. For example, delivering facilitation techniques that highlight useful information, points of entry and support.
We would be flexible and adapt the our facilitation, for example during the Q+A we would ask people to submit questions and vote on the most popular if there is a large group of people.
If we have low engagement, we would hope that the recording can reach a wider range of participants and be a catalyst for the objectives highlighted.
What happens after MozFest? We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after MozFest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:We hope to see more people from diverse backgrounds with technical skills and community resources to make the internet a truly diverse place.
What language would you like to host your session in?:English, Dutch, Frisian, Bengali, German, Russian, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, Kiswahili, Cantonese