Mozilla launches open-source voice recognition engine

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation, makers of the Firefox browser, launched a new project called Common Voice, the first open-source voice recognition engine on the market.

Mozilla launched Common Voice in mid-June, and the project is currently in a training phase. The organization is asking users to help train the engine by reading small pieces of text or by verifying the accuracy of previous voice recordings.

The aim is to collect at least 10,000 hours of voice recordings that Mozilla engineers feel would be enough to train their voice recognition system. Mozilla said it plans to release the Common Voice database into open-source later in 2017.

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open-source voice recognition system

Mozilla says it embarked on this project because of a lack of an open-source voice recognition system on the market. Currently, all voice recognition engines are locked up behind proprietary code at various companies, such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana.



According to Mozilla, we’re launching Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Common Voice provides an accessible voice recognition technology to ordinary developers who can"t afford to invest billions in Cortana-like technologies.

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Users who want to contribute their voice to the Common Voice database can do on the project"s website. They don"t need fancy microphones or sound-proof rooms to read out supplied texts. Mozilla says, they want to collect data from real-world environments, so, if there"s background noise or the user has an accent. The texts users asked to read are in English.

The time has come for an open source data set that can change the game. The time is right for Project Common Voice. The company"s market share with Firefox has plummeted in recent years, but the existence of the Mozilla Foundation remains crucial.