Voice technology is increasingly the gateway to the internet — but this technology doesn’t serve everyone equally. Indeed, neither Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, nor Google Home support a single native African language. This means that millions of people who speak Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda, and other African languages can’t use voice technology to do something as simple as checking the weather — or something as important as checking for COVID updates.
Mozilla’s Common Voice is an open-source initiative to address this disparity, by creating open-source voice data sets in underserved languages.
Since 2019, Mozilla has been working with the GIZ FAIR Forward initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UK's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to promote the creation and use of open voice data and technology in the East African languages Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, and Luganda.