6 ms·

Mozilla CommonVoice is definitely trying. I always do a few validations and a few clips if I have a few minutes to spare, and I recommend everyone does. They ne

Mozilla CommonVoice is definitely trying. I always do a few validations and a few clips if I have a few minutes to spare, and I recommend everyone does. They need volunteers to validate and upload speech clips to create a dataset. https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en

jfarina 5y ago
I wonder if they use movies and tv; recordings where the script is already available.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  That's fine for training your own model, but I don't think you could distribute the training set. That seems like a clear copyright violation, against one of the groups that cares most about copyright. Maybe you could convince a couple of indie creators or state-run programs to licence their audio? But I'm not sure if negotiating that is more efficient than just recording a bit more audio, or promoting the project to get more volunteers.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    Does using copyrighted works to train a machine learning model make that model infringing?
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      GP is not talking about the model but about the training data set.
      - sodality2 5y ago
        I am aware, I'm asking if the model, however, is infringing. Surely you can't distribute them in a dataset but is training on copyrighted data legal, and can you distribute that model?
        _jal 5y ago
        All text written by a human in the US is automatically copyright the author. So if an engine trained on works under copyright is a derivative work, GPT3 and friends have serious problems.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      Generally a ML model transforms the copyrighted material to the point where it isn't recognizable, so it should be treated as its own unrelated work that isn't infringing or derivative. But then you have e.g. GPT that is reproducing some (largeish) parts of the training set word-for-word, which might be infringing. Also I don't think there have been any major court cases about this, so there's no clear precedent in either direction.
      - sodality2 5y ago
        Thanks!
      - visarga 5y ago
        > But then you have e.g. GPT that is reproducing some (largeish) parts of the training set word-for-word, which might be infringing. Easy fix - keep a bloom filter of hashed ngrams ensuring you don't repeat more than N words from the training set.
      - pabs3 5y ago
        There are some that say that the Google Books court case is precedent for ML model stuff, if you search back through my comment history you will find links.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    It would likely be a lot easier for someone from within the BBC, CBC, PBS, or another public broadcaster to convince their employer to contribute to the models. These organizations often have accessibility mandates with real teeth and real costs implementing that mandate. The work of closed captioning, for example, can realistically be improved by excellent open source speech recognition and TTS models without handing all of the power over to Youtube and the like. It would still be an uphill battle to convince them to hand over the training set but the legal department can likely be convinced if the data set they contribute back is heavily chopped up audio of the original content, especially if they have the originals before mixing. I imagine short audio files without any of the music, sound effects, or visual content are pretty much worthless as far as IP goes.
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    That's fine for training your own model, but I don't think you could distribute the training set. That seems like a clear copyright violation, against one of the groups that cares most about copyright. I'm not sure that is a clear copyright violation. Sure, at a glance it seems like a derivative work, but it may be altered enough that it is not. I believe that collages, and reference guides like cliff notes are both legal. I think a bigger problem would be that the scripts, and even the closed captioning, rarely match the recorded audio 100%
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      And also... it's not like the program actually contains a copy of the training data, right? The training data is a tool which is used to build a model.
  - taneq 5y ago
    How is it different from things like GPT3 which (unless I’m mistaken) is trained on a giant web scrape? I thought they didn’t release the model out of concerns for what people would do with a general prose generator rather than any copyright concerns?
- kelnos 5y ago
  I expect that wouldn't be perfect, though. Sometimes the cut that makes it into the final product doesn't exactly match the script. Sometimes it's due to an edit, other times it's due to an actor saying something similar to but not exactly what the script says, but the director deciding to just go with it. What might work better is using closed captions or subtitles, but I've also seen enough cases where those don't exactly match the actual speech either.
  - habibur 5y ago
    He meant subtitle when he talked of script.
  - taneq 5y ago
    They might work even better for interpreting the intent of spoken text. Not great for dictation though.
wcarss 5y ago
I've used the deepspeech project a fair amount and it is good. It's not perfect, certainly, and it honestly isn't good enough yet for an accurate transcription in my mind, but it's good. Easy to work with, pretty good results, and all the right kinds of free. Thanks for taking time to contribute!
tootie 5y ago
If you read the doc, it says voice2json is layer on top of the actual voice recognition engine. And it supports mozilla deep speech, pocket sphinx and a few others as the underlying engine.
teraflop 5y ago
I like the idea, and decided to try doing some validation. The first thing I noticed is that it asks me to make a yes-or-no judgment of whether the sentence was spoken "accurately", but nowhere on the site is it explained what "accurate" means, or how strict I should be. (The first clip I got was spoken more or less correctly, but a couple of words are slurred together and the prosody is awkward. Without having a good idea of the standards and goals of the project, I have no idea whether including this clip would make the overall dataset better or worse. My gut feeling is that it's good for training recognition, and bad for training synthesis.) This seems to me like a major issue, since it should take a relatively small amount of effort to write up a list of guidelines, and it would be hugely beneficial to establish those guidelines before asking a lot of volunteers to donate their time. I don't find it encouraging that this has been an open issue for four years, with apparently no action except a bunch of bikeshedding: https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/273 https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/273
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- xwx 5y ago
  I downloaded the (unofficial) Common Voice app [1] and it provides a link to some guidelines [2], which also aren't official but look sensible and seem like the best there is at the moment. [1] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.commonvoice.saverio/ https://f-droid.org/packages/org.commonvoice.saverio/ [2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/discussion-of-new-guidelines-for-recording-validation/36465 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/discussion-of-new-guidelines...
- cptskippy 5y ago
  After listening to about 10 clips your point becomes abundantly clear. One speaker, who sounded like they were from the mid-west United States, was dropping the S off words in a couple clips. I wasn't sure if it was misreads or some accent I'd never heard. Another speaker, with a thick accent that sounded European, sounded out all the vowels in circuit. Had I not had the line being read, I don't think I'd have understood the word. I heard a speaker with an Indian accent who added a preposition to the sentence that was inconsequential but incorrect none the less. I hear these random prepositions added as flourishes frequently with some Indian coworkers, does anyone know the a reason? It's kind of like how American's interject "Umm..." or drop prepositions (e.g. "Are you done your meal?") and I almost didn't pick up on it. For that matter where did the American habit of dropping prepositions come from? It seems like it's people in the North East primarily.
cerved 5y ago
Weird sentences
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jfarina 5y ago

I wonder if they use movies and tv; recordings where the script is already available.

wongarsu 5y ago
That's fine for training your own model, but I don't think you could distribute the training set. That seems like a clear copyright violation, against one of the groups that cares most about copyright. Maybe you could convince a couple of indie creators or state-run programs to licence their audio? But I'm not sure if negotiating that is more efficient than just recording a bit more audio, or promoting the project to get more volunteers.
- sodality2 5y ago
  Does using copyrighted works to train a machine learning model make that model infringing?
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    GP is not talking about the model but about the training data set.
    - sodality2 5y ago
      I am aware, I'm asking if the model, however, is infringing. Surely you can't distribute them in a dataset but is training on copyrighted data legal, and can you distribute that model?
      - _jal 5y ago
        All text written by a human in the US is automatically copyright the author. So if an engine trained on works under copyright is a derivative work, GPT3 and friends have serious problems.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    Generally a ML model transforms the copyrighted material to the point where it isn't recognizable, so it should be treated as its own unrelated work that isn't infringing or derivative. But then you have e.g. GPT that is reproducing some (largeish) parts of the training set word-for-word, which might be infringing. Also I don't think there have been any major court cases about this, so there's no clear precedent in either direction.
    - sodality2 5y ago
      Thanks!
    - visarga 5y ago
      > But then you have e.g. GPT that is reproducing some (largeish) parts of the training set word-for-word, which might be infringing. Easy fix - keep a bloom filter of hashed ngrams ensuring you don't repeat more than N words from the training set.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      There are some that say that the Google Books court case is precedent for ML model stuff, if you search back through my comment history you will find links.
- akiselev 5y ago
  It would likely be a lot easier for someone from within the BBC, CBC, PBS, or another public broadcaster to convince their employer to contribute to the models. These organizations often have accessibility mandates with real teeth and real costs implementing that mandate. The work of closed captioning, for example, can realistically be improved by excellent open source speech recognition and TTS models without handing all of the power over to Youtube and the like. It would still be an uphill battle to convince them to hand over the training set but the legal department can likely be convinced if the data set they contribute back is heavily chopped up audio of the original content, especially if they have the originals before mixing. I imagine short audio files without any of the music, sound effects, or visual content are pretty much worthless as far as IP goes.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  That's fine for training your own model, but I don't think you could distribute the training set. That seems like a clear copyright violation, against one of the groups that cares most about copyright. I'm not sure that is a clear copyright violation. Sure, at a glance it seems like a derivative work, but it may be altered enough that it is not. I believe that collages, and reference guides like cliff notes are both legal. I think a bigger problem would be that the scripts, and even the closed captioning, rarely match the recorded audio 100%
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    And also... it's not like the program actually contains a copy of the training data, right? The training data is a tool which is used to build a model.
- taneq 5y ago
  How is it different from things like GPT3 which (unless I’m mistaken) is trained on a giant web scrape? I thought they didn’t release the model out of concerns for what people would do with a general prose generator rather than any copyright concerns?
kelnos 5y ago
I expect that wouldn't be perfect, though. Sometimes the cut that makes it into the final product doesn't exactly match the script. Sometimes it's due to an edit, other times it's due to an actor saying something similar to but not exactly what the script says, but the director deciding to just go with it. What might work better is using closed captions or subtitles, but I've also seen enough cases where those don't exactly match the actual speech either.
- habibur 5y ago
  He meant subtitle when he talked of script.
- taneq 5y ago
  They might work even better for interpreting the intent of spoken text. Not great for dictation though.

wcarss 5y ago

I've used the deepspeech project a fair amount and it is good. It's not perfect, certainly, and it honestly isn't good enough yet for an accurate transcription in my mind, but it's good. Easy to work with, pretty good results, and all the right kinds of free. Thanks for taking time to contribute!

tootie 5y ago

If you read the doc, it says voice2json is layer on top of the actual voice recognition engine. And it supports mozilla deep speech, pocket sphinx and a few others as the underlying engine.

teraflop 5y ago

I like the idea, and decided to try doing some validation. The first thing I noticed is that it asks me to make a yes-or-no judgment of whether the sentence was spoken "accurately", but nowhere on the site is it explained what "accurate" means, or how strict I should be. (The first clip I got was spoken more or less correctly, but a couple of words are slurred together and the prosody is awkward. Without having a good idea of the standards and goals of the project, I have no idea whether including this clip would make the overall dataset better or worse. My gut feeling is that it's good for training recognition, and bad for training synthesis.) This seems to me like a major issue, since it should take a relatively small amount of effort to write up a list of guidelines, and it would be hugely beneficial to establish those guidelines before asking a lot of volunteers to donate their time. I don't find it encouraging that this has been an open issue for four years, with apparently no action except a bunch of bikeshedding: https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/273 https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/273

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xwx 5y ago
I downloaded the (unofficial) Common Voice app [1] and it provides a link to some guidelines [2], which also aren't official but look sensible and seem like the best there is at the moment. [1] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.commonvoice.saverio/ https://f-droid.org/packages/org.commonvoice.saverio/ [2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/discussion-of-new-guidelines-for-recording-validation/36465 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/discussion-of-new-guidelines...
cptskippy 5y ago
After listening to about 10 clips your point becomes abundantly clear. One speaker, who sounded like they were from the mid-west United States, was dropping the S off words in a couple clips. I wasn't sure if it was misreads or some accent I'd never heard. Another speaker, with a thick accent that sounded European, sounded out all the vowels in circuit. Had I not had the line being read, I don't think I'd have understood the word. I heard a speaker with an Indian accent who added a preposition to the sentence that was inconsequential but incorrect none the less. I hear these random prepositions added as flourishes frequently with some Indian coworkers, does anyone know the a reason? It's kind of like how American's interject "Umm..." or drop prepositions (e.g. "Are you done your meal?") and I almost didn't pick up on it. For that matter where did the American habit of dropping prepositions come from? It seems like it's people in the North East primarily.

cerved 5y ago

Weird sentences

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]