The Mozilla Common Voice project enables a global community of volunteers to improve digital products and services that incorporate voice, by recording themselves reading CC0 sentences in their languages. But where do these sentences our volunteers read come from? Some come from scraping large CC0 resources like Wikipedia, but volunteers can also contribute copyright-free sentences via the Common Voice Sentence Collector. And we’ve made some changes to the Sentence Collector to make it easier to contribute new sentences to the Common Voice corpus.
Starting from the week of May 8th, the Sentence Collector will be changing.
New look, new features
We’ve moved the Sentence Collector to sit within the Common Voice website to make it easier to find this tool. You can now write your own original sentence submissions and review others’ submissions in the Common Voice interface,
How to use the Sentence Collector
The new Sentence Collector has been built into the Common Voice interface to make it easier for you to find it. To find the Sentence Collector, select the “contribute” dropdown from the Common Voice landing page. From this dropdown you can choose to either write (or paste) new sentences into Common Voice by selecting “Write” or review sentences others have contributed by selecting “Review”.
From the Write screen, you’ll be able to write an original sentence or paste in one from a CC0 source. Add where you found your sentence (or write “self” if it’s your original work!) and confirm that there’s no copyright attached to submit your new sentence. At the moment, the Sentence Collector is designed to accept one single sentence submission at a time.
To review sentences, navigate to the “Review” tab.
If the sentence shown makes sense in your language and meets the guidelines on the right hand panel, press yes to confirm. If the sentence does not meet guidelines, press no to keep it out of the corpus. Not sure if this sentence is a good fit? You can click “skip” and other reviewers will check it out later.
What if I want to make a bulk contribution?
If contributing single sentences isn’t a good fit for you, please follow the instructions for uploading bulk sentences to Common Voice.
What’s next?
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the new Sentence Collector changes to make sure that they’re working well. If you see any bugs or have any feedback, we always want to chat to you on Discourse, Matrix or you can email the Common Voice inbox. Once we’re sure that the Sentence Collector is working well in its new home, we’ll be rolling out additional features including a bulk sentence submission feature.