Language: English (mozilla)
Thursday, March 3rd, 2022: 9am CET // 11am EAT
Mozilla Common Voice and MozFest are working to improve the representation of Kiswahili in Common Voice; an open, crowd-sourced database designed to help people create voice recognition applications that better understand a diverse set of languages and accents.
The goal of this weeklong contribute-a-thon will be to increase participation for varying dialects and accents of Kiswahili that are typically underrepresented in voice databases globally. Partners include: Devstoriesafrica, Hekaya Initiative, Utafiti Hub, Pwani Teknowgalz, Swahilipot Hub, GIZ FairForward, and KenCorpus.
The goal of this weeklong contribute-a-thon will be to increase participation for varying dialects and accents of Kiswahili that are typically underrepresented in voice databases globally.
Why did you choose that space? How does your session align with the space description?:Facilitators are Mozilla staff and fellows.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session? What if 30 participants attend? What if there are 3?:the more, the better. contributions happen async over the week.
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 keep growing the kiswahili community in common voice
What language would you like to host your session in?: English, Kiswahili
Hillary (she/her) is the Common Voice Community Manager at Mozilla. Mozilla Common Voice is an open-source initiative to make voice technology more inclusive. Contributors donate speech data to a public dataset, which anyone can then use to train voice-enabled technology. As part of the role, Hillary support language communities through activities such as the Common Voice Language Reps to facilitate community feedback and cross-communal learning.
Britone Mwasaru is a technologist and community builder. He will be working on voice technology with a focus on the Kiswahili language.
