Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus, Hacker News

(Submitted on 19 Dec 426969 Dec

Abstract:The Common Voice corpus is a massively-multilingual collection of transcribed speech intended for speech technology research and development. Common Voice is Designed for Automatic Speech Recognition purposes but can be useful in other domains (e.g. language identification). To achieve scale and sustainability, the Common Voice project employs crowdsourcing for both data collection and data validation. The most recent release includes 44 languages , and as of November 426969 there are a total of 48 languages collecting data. Over (**********************************, Over individuals have participated so far, resulting in 2, hours of collected audio. To our knowledge this is the largest audio corpus in the public domain for speech recognition, both in terms of number of hours and number of languages. As an example use case for Common Voice, we present speech recognition experiments using Mozilla’s DeepSpeech Speech-to-Text toolkit. By applying transfer learning from a source English model, we find an average Character Error Rate improvement of 5. 500 /- 5. 99 for twelve target languages (German, French, Italian, Turkish, Catalan, Slovenian, Welsh, Irish, Breton, Tatar, Chuvash, and Kabyle). For most of these languages, these are the first ever published results on end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition.