Please consider reading to Mozilla Common Voice

https://voice.mozilla.org/

I am going to share some thoughts about smart speakers, personal assistants, voice activated assistants, whatever you wish to call them in a future post.

These devices are all good, Amazon Echo currently is probably the best. There are a number of articles on actionable steps you can take to manage your privacy with the Amazon technology. Here is one by USA today and another less actionable by Forbes. However, the bottom line is that with any of the commercial solutions clips of your voice, (and background noise), will be sent to and potentially stored in, the cloud.

There are alternative to Amazon, Siri, Cortana, Home, but they are poor stepchildren indeed. However, they like their big brothers and sisters get better the more they are trained. One of the programs is the Mozilla Common Voice. They are trying to build, train, a Speech To Text, (STT), capability.

I have been using an open source assistant for a month. The only way it can get better is if we teach it. If you have either the Firefox or Chrome browser, please consider investing 15 - 30 minutes of your time. They give you three sentences, one at a time to read. You press the recording, review and re-record if necessary, and submit your three voice clips.
https://voice.mozilla.org/record

They also have a play back feature. The read a sentence and you mark whether it is correct or not.


Please consider helping to create a usable alternative to the commercial, "walled garden", systems.

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