Multilingual Speech Technologies That Understand You

As more and more users connect to the web for the first time, they’re often met with an online environment that fails to support them in the languages they use day to day. Limited language options on the web and in connected technologies doesn’t just leave individual users unsupported, but also contributes to pressures that endanger minority languages. To help combat these pressures in speech technologies, Common Voice has collected a multilingual, crowdsourced speech dataset to encourage developers and researchers to build for their communities in the languages they use daily. Together we’ll explore how speech technologies lower barriers to access for web users, how dataset access issues often restrict linguistic diversity and look at what a future of meaningfully inclusive speech technologies could mean for the speakers of +7000 languages around the world.