The Common Voice datasets are collected and distributed to help make sure that voice technologies can serve as wide a range of global speakers as possible. While our small team speaks a dozen languages, we don’t have the expertise needed to make informed language decisions about the 120+ languages on our platform. Common Voice has always been a community effort and we want to work more closely with our language communities as we continue to grow to serve you.

We’re launching a Language Community Champion Program, inspired by previous initiatives like the Kiswahili Champions program and the Language Reps Council. This program will help to make sure that decisions for individual languages on Common Voice are being driven by speakers of that language. This group will consist of volunteers who can serve as the primary reference and point of contact for any language-specific questions, decisions and concerns.

As this is a voluntary role we want to keep the scope of this advisory work lightweight for our volunteers. For now, we’re simply looking for individuals interested in being part of this community and offering their expertise when possible. For example, we may reach out for your advice when there’s a question of what orthography to use for a new language, to help us make decisions about a bulk sentence request in your language or just to get your thoughts on language-specific dataset quality issues.

If you’re interested in joining this effort and representing your language, please register your interest through this community champion expression of interest form.

For users unable to access this form, you can alternatively email us at commonvoice(at)mozilla.com with the subject line “Community Champions” and the following information:

  • Email: ...
  • Full Names and Surname: ...
  • Language Name: ...
  • Language Code:
  • Time Zone: ...
  • Are you interested in attending monthly/bi-monthly community meetings?: (Yes / No / Maybe)
  • Experience or background in this language: ...
  • Any additional information or notes: ...

We want to move quickly to include your language expertise in the direction of Common Voice, so we are planning a kickoff meeting at the end of September to discuss various issues related to language communities, data quality, and how we can improve collaboration moving forward.

If you know a linguist, ASR engineer, language activist or speech technology enthusiast who you think would be interested, please share this call for participation with them too.

We look forward to working together to improve the experience of all language communities participating in the Common Voice project!

Thank you for your continued support!