Ryakitimbo has collected voice data in Kiswahili in Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She tells me she wanted to gather voices from a socioeconomically diverse set of Kiswahili speakers and has reached out to women young and old living in rural areas, who may not at all times be literate and even have access to devices.
This sort of data collection is difficult. The importance of collecting AI voice data can feel abstract to many individuals, especially in the event that they aren’t aware of the technologies. Ryakitimbo and volunteers would approach women in settings where they felt secure to start with, similar to presentations on menstrual hygiene, and explain how the technology could, for instance, help disseminate details about menstruation. For girls who didn’t know how one can read, the team read out sentences that they might repeat for the recording.
The Common Voice project is bolstered by the idea that languages form a extremely necessary a part of identity. “We expect it’s not nearly language, but about transmitting culture and heritage and treasuring people’s particular cultural context,” says Lewis-Jong. “There are every kind of idioms and cultural catchphrases that just don’t translate,” they add.
Common Voice is the one audio data set where English doesn’t dominate, says Willie Agnew, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied audio data sets. “I’m very impressed with how well they’ve done that and the way well they’ve made this data set that is definitely pretty diverse,” Agnew says. “It seems like they’re way far ahead of virtually all the opposite projects we checked out.”
I spent a while verifying the recordings of other Finnish speakers on the Common Voice platform. As their voices echoed in my study, I felt surprisingly touched. We had all gathered around the identical cause: making AI data more inclusive, and ensuring our culture and language was properly represented in the following generation of AI tools.
But I had some big questions on what would occur to my voice if I donated it. Once it was in the info set, I’d haven’t any control about the way it is likely to be used afterwards. The tech sector isn’t exactly known for giving people proper credit, and the info is offered for anyone’s use.
“As much as we wish it to profit the local communities, there’s a possibility that also Big Tech could make use of the identical data and construct something that then comes out because the industrial product,” says Ryakitimbo. Though Mozilla doesn’t share who has downloaded Common Voice, Lewis-Jong tells me Meta and Nvidia have said that they’ve used it.
Open access to this hard-won and rare language data shouldn’t be something all minority groups want, says Harry H. Jiang, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, who was a part of the team doing audit research. For instance, Indigenous groups have raised concerns.
