Wouldn’t it be great, if Google Assistant or Yandex Alisa spoke Kazakh?

One necessary component of such speech-enabled digital assistants is a so-called speech recognition or speech-to-text system.

Large amounts of audio data (thousands of hours, see below), from many different people, along with transcriptions, are needed to train a good speech-to-text system using machine learning methods. So far, due to lack of appropriately licensed, freely available audio data in them, building a high-accuracy free/libre/open-source (FLOSS) speech recognition system is out of reach for most languages.

Fortunately, there is a way to change this for the better. In 2018, Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web-browser and many other programs, had launched the Common Voice project.

Here is a snippet from its FAQ page:

What is Common Voice?

Voice recognition technology is revolutionizing the way we interact with machines, but the currently available systems are expensive and proprietary. Common Voice is part of Mozilla’s initiative to make voice recognition technologies better and more accessible for everyone. Common Voice is a massive global database of donated voices that lets anyone quickly and easily train voice-enabled apps in potentially every language.

We’re not only collecting voice samples in widely spoken languages but also in those with a smaller population of speakers. Publishing a diverse dataset of voices will empower developers, entrepreneurs, and communities to address this gap themselves. In addition to the Common Voice dataset, we’re also building an open source speech recognition engine called Deep Speech.

How you can help

We at taruen.com want to launch Common Voice in Kazakh, and started taking first steps towards that goal. But for that to happen, we need help from native speakers of Kazakh. If you are one, here is how you can help:

1. Review whether Common Voice website has been correctly translated into Kazakh on Pontoon, Mozilla’s localisation tool. About one-third of the translations were authored by us — non-native Kazakh speakers — and thus might be incorrect.

2. Review Kazakh sentences we’ve submitted to the Common Voice Sentence Collector tool. At least 5000 reviewed sentences are needed to “launch” a language on Common Voice.

These sentences were taken from the Volumes 65 and 68 of the mighty 100-volume set with works of Kazakh folklore, called “Бабалар сөзі” and published by M. Auezov Institute of Literature and Art. By Article 8 of Kazakhstani Copyright Law, works of folklore are exempt from copyright and are thus in the public domain and suitable for submitting to Common Voice. Moreover, proverbs from volumes 65 and 68 match other criteria of the Common Voice project as well — they don’t contain digits, foreign letters and other symbols not allowed in the dataset, they are mostly short, arguably pedagogical/entertaining and thus fun to read.

Besides usual checks for correct spelling and grammaticality required by Common Voice, when reviewing sentences, we also ask you to make sure that none of the sentences are remotely offensive to men, women, parents, children, religious people, non-religious people, Southern Kazakhstanis, Northern Kazakhstanis, Western Kazakhstanis, Eastern Kazakhstanis, Kazakhs of China, Kazakhs of … You get the idea. A glimpse over the sentences did not suggest that they would contain anything like that, but again, that’s something for native speakers to judge.

We hope that together we can assemble enough data so that anyone who wishes to do so can train a speech-to-text system for Kazakh. On the FAQ page of the project, Mozillians mention 10000 hours as an approximate number of validated hours needed to train a production speech-to-text system, so that’s something to strive for. It does sound like a lot, but when divided among even a conservative number of Kazakh speakers, it requires each person to record sentences for about 4 seconds. That is a much less scary number ;)