Mozilla's initiative to help teach machines how real people speak

voice.mozilla.org

33 points·tminima··6 comments

This is the third submission this week. Has there been some recent activity that's not immediately obvious just looking at the site itself?

Previous discussion with 48 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268579

Firefox showed me an ad (or whatever you want to call it) for common voice yesterday, so I would guess that's why it's suddenly being posted a lot.

I guess that also explains why all their "help us get to X" have been achieved several times over. Hopefully most of those contributions are actually by serious participants and not just a bunch of trolls trying to poison the database.

It strikes me as rather odd that Mozilla would be involved in such a dystopia extending enterprise. I realize that it is unlikely that not doing this work would not prevent it from being done at some point, but it seems like a worthwhile choice not to engage in it even if it just delays things long enough until regulations, laws, countermeasures, or even technology solutions can emerge, can catch up, or be developed.

Mozilla has done some work on text-to-speech and the other way around too (I think).

[https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech]

Not so surprising that they want to stay on the cutting edge. The best way to shape the future is too invent it (misquoting Alan Kay)

Would you rather train text-to-speech technology based on conversations your television eavesdropped on, or with a collaboratively-built open database of voluntarily submitted content?

This is the perfect exit for precisely the problem you're pointing at: if the data is open it doesn't need to be massively harvested to make this work, and you can run the text-to-speech engine entirely offline on the device.

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