Common Voice, a citizens' initiative for voice technology in Basque, will be present at the Euskarabildua conference
- It is increasingly being heard that in future we will not use the keyboard. The use of the voice to interact with the machines is becoming more frequent and for this purpose there are different tools: Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa... These tools are very easy, but they're all tools that depend on big tech companies.
These proprietary softwares have shown several problems:
They can only be used in the most widespread languages. The big companies behind them look only at the economic benefits, so small languages are not viable for them.
They disregard the diversity of voices. Most of the voices that have historically been used to train these devices have been white middle-class men, so whatever comes out of them will be harder to understand for machines.
They've also shown privacy issues. Although for commercial purposes in these large companies the citizens were not talking to the apparatus, a few years ago it was leaked that listening to voice recordings was underway.
A positive message is that there are alternatives that want to teach machines small languages and that serve the privacy of citizens. Common Voice is a Mozilla initiative that seeks technology for free voice knowledge and this year’s Euskarabildua will release this project.
To achieve this free knowledge of the voice, it takes thousands or millions of voices to contribute in different languages. In this endeavor for free technology in Euskera, the Librezale group began to boost Mozilla's initiative and in 2023 the VPL wanted to support the initiative, collaborating in the promotion, within the overall strategy of Gaitezen Linguistic Technologies. Thus, starting next November, in collaboration with Topagunea, initiatives will be launched to promote recordings in Basque of citizens of the Basque Country.
At Euskarabildua, Asier Iturralde, member of Librezal, will provide information on the Common Voice project and Garbiñe Garagarza (Topagunea) will share information on voice recording sessions in Euskal Herria during the months of November and December.
Iametza talked about the trajectory and development of Common Voic in his latest podcast ‘The cloud does not exist’. To learn more, listen to the interview with Marko Txopitea, member of Librezal.
The Euskarabildua Day will be held on October 26 at the San Telmo Museum and is organized by ARGIA, together with companies from the Iametza and Ametzagaiña group. Registration can be done via the web www.euskarabildua.eus.
