punchingwater

Joined 11 years ago

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135

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Member since

Dec 30

Hi, I'm Michael. You can find more of me here:

https://github.com/mikehenrty

and here:

https://twitter.com/mikehenrty

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Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago

Audiobooks are definitely possible for ASR training. Indeed the largest open ASR training dataset before Common Voice was LibriSpeech (http://www.openslr.org/12/). Also note, the first release of Mozilla's DeepSpeech models were trained and tested with LibriSpeech: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/a-journey-to-10-word-error...

But as others have mentioned, there are several problems with audiobooks as an ASR training dataset. First, the language used in literature is often very different from how people actually speak, especially if that language comes from very old texts (which many public domain books are indeed quite old).

Then there is the sound profile, which includes background noise, quality of microphone, speakers distance to device, etc. For recorded audio books, the speaker is often using a somewhat sophisticated setup to make the audio quality as clean as possible. This type of setup is obviously unusual when people want to speak to their devices.

Third, the tone and cadence of read speech is different than that of spontaneous speech (the Common Voice dataset also has this problem, but they are coming up with ideas on how to prompt for spontaneous speech too).

But the goal of Common Voice was never to replace LibreSpeech or other open datasets (like TED talks) as training sets, but rather to compliment them. You mention transfer learning. That is indeed possible. But it's also possible to simply put several datasets together and train on all of them from scratch. That is what Mozilla's DeepSpeech team has been doing since the beginning (you can read the above hacks blog post from Reuben Morais for more context there).

Comment · 8 years ago

the article states:

> “But Reitze counters that the complete data from that first run is already available online. According to Shoemaker, this includes the relevant time series data and the programs used, but "it's not a trivial matter to use them." Caltech even held a training workshop on how to deal with gravitational-wave data. That's a pretty far cry from asking the physics community to take its analysis on faith...”

Are you refuting this statement? To me, it looks like the data/analysis are open, but not yet independently verified due to difficult nature of problem space.

Comment · 8 years ago

Just to add my two cents (I work for Mozilla on Common Voice): without help from linguists, Common Voice would have made some very different and very bad decisions about all sorts of things like: accents, dialect segmentation, corpus curation, licensing, and many other things. Linguistics were absolutely instrumental. We tried to thank some of them at the end of our blog post: https://medium.com/mozilla-open-innovation/more-common-voice...

Comment · 8 years ago

We have no plans to allow users to download the "raw" data from s3 (ie. before we perform the train/dev/test split). But we want to eventually build some tools to automate this. See here for some background:

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-mozilla-guarantee-publis...

Comment · 8 years ago

> The other thing is that it's very cool to see the "you helped us reach out x% goal" thing but it locks up all the previous / next shortcuts which means I have to switch back to the mouse after 5 entries.

We have a workaround in place, btw: https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web/issues/1179#issuecommen...

Comment · 8 years ago

Just to note, we will never require your email address to contribute. There will always be an anonymous contribution workflow.

But adding new languages to Common Voice is a bit complicated at the moment, and we haven't built a way to do this through the website yet. So for now, we are doing this through a very manual process, and we plan to use email addresses to communicate.

Comment · 8 years ago

Thank you for bringing this up.

Indeed Common Voice is not for everyone. We try to make it clear in our Privacy Policy [1] what pieces of data we collect and why. We do not publish email address or names with the data, and we even strip speaker identification info (so that a speaker's recordings are not grouped but instead everyone's recordings go into one giant bucket). That said, if this still makes you feel uncomfortable, we understand. And if you would like to contribute without donating your voice, you can always validate the recordings of others.