Contribute to Common Voice

Everyone can take part in Common Voice! You don’t need technical experience, though if you do have it, that’s great too! You can start today on the Common Voice platform.

A quality dataset benefits from a diversity of accents and recording qualities, which is why we need contributors from multiple locations!

How to Donate your voice 

1. Visit the common voice platform and create an optional account to track your progress.
2. Click on “Speak.”
3. Click on the microphone and read the sentence out loud.
4. Click the red stop icon when you’re finished.
5. Keep recording until you’ve reached at least five sentences and then click submit.

How to review voice clips 

1. Go to the common voice platform and click on “Listen.”
2. Listen carefully to the words they say
3. If the voice clip matches the sentence, click “yes.”
4. f the voice clip doesn’t match the sentence, click “no.” (Note: different accents are fine, and encouraged! Learn more about the contribution criteria)
5. Repeat.

Help us find more people who want to contribute their voices!

“I’m helping voice AI work better for everyone. I’ve just donated my voice at https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/ #CommonVoice”

Contribute with your friends, family or organize a larger event for a giant Common Voice contribute-a-thon.

Here is a POSTER you can use for your event!

1. Introduce participants to the Common Voice project (10 minutes).

Introduce the participants to the common voice project. Talk about why it’s important and show them how easy contributing is with just a smartphone. Here are some SLIDES that might be helpful. You can also consider visiting the website https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/ together.

2. Ask all your participants to create an account on their device (10 minutes)

3. Spend 15 minutes contributing voice clips (15-30 minutes)

4. Review other people’s voice clips by using the “Listen” function on the Common Voice homepage.(20 minutes)

P.S. If the space is small or loud you may want to split the group in two, with one half donating voice clips and the other half reviewing clips, switching after 15 minutes.

For a large group, you can have the group split up into pairs. One person will play the recording on their device and the other person will listen (without reading the screen). The listener will repeat what they heard to confirm if the voice clip is accurate.

After 15 minutes, ask the pairs to switch roles.

5. Track progress and recognise participants

You can easily transform contributions in a game! Make sure your participants have an account set up so everyone can keep track of their contributions using the counter at the top of the website:

You might want to announce when people pass 25, 50, 100 clips. You can even create a leaderboard in your space (advised for smaller groups) Have prizes for people that hit their goal first (advised for smaller groups) Have prizes for people who record the most clips (advised for larger groups).

Prizes can be something like stickers or even as simple as a shout-out at the event.

6. Wrap-up and share (5 minutes)

The activity owner will ask participants to share their progress and broadcast the event using #CommonVoice on social media.

You can set up a booth at a conference or in a large public space to collect as many voices as possible and to spread the word about the common voice project.

We recommend setting up the booth with at least one or two devices using Firefox in full-screen mode with the Common Voice website pre-loaded. You can use this Common Voice POSTER and Instructions DOCUMENT to help teach participants how to contribute.

Spread the word:

Use your contribution booth to explain to participants how their voices can help create a public dataset that benefits everyone.

Examples:

• Hello! How are you doing? Did you know you can help make voice recognition technologies work better for everyone by donating your voice?
• Hi! Do you have a minute to talk about data privacy and voice technology? The Common Voice project is Mozilla’s initiative to help machines understand how real people talk.
• Hello there! Do you have a minute to help our open-source voice technology initiative? Collect voices:

After this initial approach, quickly introduce people to the Common Voice project and invite them to donate a few minutes of their time to contribute. Even three minutes of recording will help!

There are many different ways to contribute to Common Voice!

If you are interested in discovering more, have a look at these two talks that Common Voice volunteers gave at FOSDEM 2022:

1. Collecting sentences for Common Voice.
2. How to start a language on Mozilla Common Voice