Mozilla Common Voice Fellows are calling all Kiswahili speakers, voice technologists and data scientists, to join them on February 24-25 for the Kiswahili Festival.
This two-day event will be hosted in partnership with Swahilipot Hub in Mombasa, Kenya and brings together the most important ingredient to growing the Kiswahili dataset: community.
Common Voice is the most multilingually diverse crowdsourced dataset in the world, powered by the voices of volunteer contributors worldwide.
Participants can contribute to a multi-language voice dataset furthering the development of inclusive machine learning models for voice applications.
Technologists who want to build voice applications can use the dataset to train machine learning models.
“Language is an important part of digital inclusion” says Mozilla Fellow and event host Britone Mwasaru.
“This event is part of a community approach towards building the open voice dataset for the Kiswahili language on the Common Voice platform. It’s about lowering barriers to building and reducing bias in tools/products created. But it’s also about developing a language dataset by and for us. And I am very excited to see what that enables.”
The festival will help grow the dataset and build awareness around Common Voice.
