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Mozilla Common Voice Updates Will Help Train the 'Hey Firefox' Wakeword For Voice-Based Web Browsing (venturebeat.com) 49

Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Common Voice now contains over 7,226 total hours of contributed voice data in 54 different languages, up from 1,400 hours across 18 languages in February 2019. From a report: Common Voice consists not only of voice snippets, but of voluntarily contributed metadata useful for training speech engines, like speakers' ages, sex, and accents. It's designed to be integrated with DeepSpeech, a suite of open source speech-to-text, text-to-speech engines, and trained models maintained by Mozilla's Machine Learning Group. Collecting the over 5.5 million clips in Common Voice required a lot of legwork, namely because the prompts on the Common Voice website had to be translated into each language. Still, 5,591 of the 7,226 hours have been confirmed valid by the project's contributors so far. And according to Mozilla, five languages in Common Voice -- English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish -- now have over 5,000 unique speakers, while seven languages -- English, German, French, Kabyle, Catalan, Spanish, and Kinyarwandan -- have over 500 recorded hours.
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Mozilla Common Voice Updates Will Help Train the 'Hey Firefox' Wakeword For Voice-Based Web Browsing

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  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday July 03, 2020 @09:06AM (#60257792)

    The Debian version will reply to "Hey GNU Icecat", but only if you say GNU, not just "Hey Icecat".

  • Why would they invest so much of their resources in this gimmicky feature?
    • It's the me-too syndrome. The big boys have "Hey Google", "Hey Alexia", "Hey Siri". So Mozilla had to have their "Hey" bullshit too. That's what happens when you're insecure about your future...

      • by tflf ( 4410717 )

        It's the me-too syndrome. The big boys have "Hey Google", "Hey Alexia", "Hey Siri". So Mozilla had to have their "Hey" bullshit too. That's what happens when you're insecure about your future...

        I've been, by told people who decided their smartphone was all the computer needed, voice is convenient, and easier to use than the tiny virtual keyboards smartphones have. Given there are more and more people who are on the smartphone-only path, voice has become a must-have. If Mozilla wants to be part of the mobile computing landscape, they need voice.
        (Qualifier: I don't use voice features, and am not a fan. By choice, I do not own a smartphone either)

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      To become the ultimate hands free porn browser.

    • So you can run it on Firefox OS on your Firefox phone. Should we work on being faster and better than Chrome? Nah fuck that let's work on a new screenshot feature.

    • the feature no one asked for

      The feature nobody asked for aka the feature that their major competitors have and which is very popular. Seriously, why are Mozilla haters so keen on denying observable reality?

      Why would they invest so much of their resources in this gimmicky feature?

      Voice activation is (a) popular and (b) here to stay. Given that, a version exists which isn't a privacy nightmare. If Mozilla don't offer what their competitors do then the large number of people who want those features will instea

  • Now THAT would be today's Mozilla! :)

    But in general: If it does not stay on my box, fuck off and die, you criminal data kraken!

  • Would it integrate with Pocket?

    Don't shoot, I am being sarcastic.
  • Will Firefox be able to pick out the commands from all my bitching at it?
    • Sounds like you've been listening to recordings of my interactions with Siri. If I day goes by where I haven't raged at Siri for completely fucking things up it's probably because I'm in a hospital bed somewhere in a coma.

      Odd how the transcription on the phone screen is mostly-right but what Siri "hears" after talking to Apple's online service is completely wrong.

      When I'm asking for directions to an address a couple of suburbs over why in the hell would you route me to address on an entirely different conti

  • by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Friday July 03, 2020 @11:32AM (#60258250) Journal

    Hey Firefox, can you fix the "never autoplay media" option in the menu that doesn't work? How about the "only use address bar for URLs" setting that doesn't work? ... Can we at least have a working variable in about:config for these?

  • your one in all Personal Assistant Fox! oh that is also a browser(I know after thought). Great!

    Just my 2 cents ;)
  • The MO of the current batch of proprietary voice command systems is to record what you're saying, transmit the audio clip to the company, have a server there do the voice recognition, and send the results back to your computer/device for further action.

    The voice recognition really needs to be happening locally. The first passable form of voice recognition [wikipedia.org] (running locally) came out over 20 years ago. So without question, modern computers have enough processing power to do voice recognition locally. Th
    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      Old wisdom was that you could skip training if the vocab was only around 10 or 20 words, but for general speech you'd need to train the system on your voice.

      I had local speech recognition on my 66mhz IBM Aptiva with 8mb ram running Windows 3.1 26 years ago. It wasn't great by today's standards, and training took more than 20 minutes, but it worked.

      The attraction to "cloud" voice recognition was that you could skip the training step. The privacy issues be damned. Never mind that Siri was secretly playing y

    • Android 10 is supposed to have on-device speech recognition. I haven't used it yet, though. The only device I have 10 on is a Nexus 7 running Lineage whatever. I suppose I should flash my X4 as well, though.

  • I got so damned tired of web browsing sounding as irritating as OTA TV that I finally said f* it and unplugged them.

  • How about implementing inline translation in the browser like Chrome has had for ages, instead of this kind of crap?
  • Thanks For Sharing This Kind Information But I Want to Know is there any chance about Viagra Tablets in Pakistan [myebayzoon.com]

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