Mozilla's open voice-recognition library now includes 18 languages

Over the past year, Mozilla worked on expanding its Common Voice initiative to include open source voice recognition datasets in more languages. Now, the organization has released the largest collection of human voices available for use in 18 different languages, including Dutch, Hakha-Chin, Esperanto, Farsi, Basque, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese (Traditional), Welsh and Kabyle. The collection is composed of 1,400 hours of recorded voice clips from 42,000 contributors. Some of them are volunteers who just wanted to help out, while others are linguists and professionals working in voice technologies. Mozilla's Common Voice project aims to make it easier for developers who don't have the resources a bigger company (such as Apple or Google) does to create voice-enabled products.