Nvidia invests $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice open source project

Mozilla recently announced that its Common Voice project has received a $1.5 million grant from NVIDIA to change the field of speech recognition. Common Voice is an open-source project of Mozilla, released based on the MPL protocol. It has been born for several years so far. It allows volunteers to contribute to the database of speech recognition software, and this database is in the public domain and can be used by everyone.

With this news, Mozilla has made a decision to move Common Voice to the leadership of the Mozilla Foundation and will become part of the company’s plan to make artificial intelligence more trustworthy. Common Voice has the ability to democratize the development of voice technology, because the existing voice data used for training algorithms are controlled by a few large companies, while Common Voice is open to everyone.

“The demand for conversational AI is growing, with chatbots and virtual assistants impacting nearly every industry,” said Kari Briski, senior director of accelerated computing product management at NVIDIA. “With Common Voice’s large and open datasets, we’re able to develop pre-trained models and offer them back to the community for free. Together, we’re working toward a shared goal of supporting and building communities — particularly for under-resourced and under-served languages.”

Mozilla said that Nvidia’s investment will accelerate the development of Common Voice and allow more communities and volunteers to participate in this project. The funds will also help Mozilla hire new employees to improve and promote Common Voice, so as to obtain better data.