Welsh Common Voice Campaign’s 1st Anniversary

Today (Friday 7th June 2019) is the one year anniversary of the launch of the Welsh language Common Voice Platform (http://voice.mozilla.cy) which is international software developer, Mozilla’s Crowdsourcing platform for speech data in multiple languages, in order to create open source speech technology for these languages.

The Language Technologies Unit at Bangor University’s Canolfan Bedwyr has already used the first Welsh corpus released by Mozilla (a total of 21 hours recordings) to create the ‘Macsen’ speech recognition app. By now, 41 hours validated recordings by 708 volunteers have been collected.

For those who have already contributed, the Unit would like to bid a big ‘thank you, and please continue to contribute!’. Those who haven’t yet contributed are urged to so. The Unit are looking for all types of accents, including Welsh learners’ accents, and if participants don’t feel confident enough to donate their voice, they can still contribute to the project by listening to the voices of other contributors.

The Language Technologies Unit would also like to thank Mozilla for including Welsh in the Common Voice project; to the Welsh Government for funding Welsh language speech recognition; and to Meddal.com for their volunteer efforts in promoting Welsh language Common Voice.

Publication date: 7 June 2019