📖 Readme: How to see my language on Common Voice

[nukeador (Ruben Martin ❌ [away till Aug 31st])]

Hello everyone,

I would like to open this topic to summarize some of the most asked question we are getting: How do I get my language in Common Voice.

There are 3 steps to have your language ready:

1. Have the website localized over pontoon.
2. Gather sentences under public domain
3. Submit and review them to be incorporated into the database using the Sentence Collector tool.

Once we have enough validated and reviewed sentences (usually over 5000), we can move a language to accept voice recording on the site and you might wonder My language is now collecting voice, what do I need to know?

Please, add any questions to this topic and we will be happy to support you

[txopi]

I wonder if you could add Basque to the in progress group. We are translating the website (78% done until now) and locating the sources we can use to prepare the whole data source: https://librezale.eus/wiki/EdukiakJabetzaPublikoan

We don’t have to wait until we have collected 5.000 sentences, isn’t it? How we must send them to you, linking chunks in Discourse, making pull requests on GitHub?

Thank you!

[nukeador (Ruben Martin ❌ [away till Aug 31st])]

I wonder if you could add Basque to the in progress group. We are translating the website (78% done until now) and locating the sources we can use to prepare the whole data source: https://librezale.eus/wiki/EdukiakJabetzaPublikoan

We don’t have to wait until we have collected 5.000 sentences, isn’t it? How we must send them to you, linking chunks in Discourse, making pull requests on GitHub?

Please, keep translating the website and collecting public domains sentences. As soon as we have the new tool ready you will be able to submit the sentences for peer-review.

If you are asking about the number of sentences to enable the voice collection on the site, yes, usually we need at least 5000 reviewed sentences.

[radoslav.kolev]

Hello!

We are working on adding Bulgarian to Common Voice and are almost finished with translating the web interface.

About collecting the sentences can you give some more details for the format and requirements that will make things easiest afterwards?

Is a simple text file with one sentence per line OK? I had seen somewhere there are limits for minimum/maximum number of words in a sentence. It would be good to state these officially here.

Also when we are ready with the web translation do we need to notify someone for it to appear on the website or it will be activated automatically?

Thanks and best regards,
Radoslav

[gregor]

Hi Radoslav,

thanks for reaching out, looking forward to having Bulgarian on the site (my sister’s husband is Bulgarian, so I have some skin in the game ).

Here’s the english sentence set as an example: https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web/tree/master/server/data/en
Indeed those are all text files, with one sentence per line.

Once the translation is done, you’d need to ping me and then we’ll activate it.

Best,
Gregor

[luc.salommez]

Hello Radoslav,

About the number of words per sentence, around 15 words max should be great.
The idea is that a sentence should take between 3 and 5 seconds to read.

Best regards,
Luc.

[radoslav.kolev]

Since the Bulgarian website is online already and we’ll start work on the sentence collection, one more question: What licenses are allowed? I’ve read on some other places about CC0 & Public domain? I guess that includes sentences authored by a submitter willing to license them using one of the two options above. Is attribution/author or source information required?

[nukeador (Ruben Martin ❌ [away till Aug 31st])]

Since the Bulgarian website is online already and we’ll start work on the sentence collection, one more question: What licenses are allowed? I’ve read on some other places about CC0 & Public domain? I guess that includes sentences authored by a submitter willing to license them using one of the two options above. Is attribution/author or source information required?

Yes, license needs to be Public Domain (CC-0) and we ask about the source so we can check it.

Thanks!

[Mte90 (Daniele Scasciafratte)]

As other suggestions because I worked on adding the Italian language with Mozilla Italia community:

• At least 7000 sentences
• No badwords because the website is open to everyone and there is no regulations
• Check if the sentences can fit 20 seconds that is the maximum of the recording
• Validate the sentences based on your language and grammar rules
• Take them from different context: books, school stuff (people donate their thesis as example), religion, IT, novels, interviews, etc.
• Review and make a workflow where there are no blocking people

PS: no wikipedia to avoid issues with licensing and be free to manipulate based on your needs.

[josh_meyer]

Here’s a blog post on how we added a new language to Common Voice, from start to finish.

http://jrmeyer.github.io/misc/2019/05/29/mozilla-kyrgyz-common-voice.html

[mar_martinez]

Hi,

Is the step 3 still blocked? I have plenty of Spanish sentences and I would like to upload them.

The source are books of public domain Spanish language literature, selecting specially dialog phrases.

On the other hand, are there other requirements about the length of the sentences, or grouping them by some categories, or type of words in the phrases or the named entities or the numbers or the dates, or the use of slang or anything else?.

Best regards,
Mar

[nukeador (Ruben Martin ❌ [away till Aug 31st])]

Is the step 3 still blocked? I have plenty of Spanish sentences and I would like to upload them.

Ideally we would have a beta version of the sentence collection tool to test before the end of the year, if the QA of that beta is satisfactory we can start using it to collect and review sentences.

And I have to say I understand it’s frustrating but please, keep collecting sentences so we can submit them through the tool as soon as it’s ready.

On the other hand, are there other requirements about the length of the sentences, or grouping them by some categories, or type of words in the phrases or the named entities or the numbers or the dates, or the use of slang or anything else?.

Yes, we are working with the Deep Speech team to have a document with all the requirements, and we want the sentence collection tool to enforce some of them so we don’t have to manually check them.

[mar_martinez]

Thanks a lot Rubén,

I have some other questions:

• How did the other languages managed? is there any workaround?
• Why is this procedure and software mandatory now for Spanish language?

Understand that is quite weird that the third (maybe second or fourth) most spoken language in the world is not included yet…

Best Regards,
Mar

[nukeador (Ruben Martin ❌ [away till Aug 31st])]

I have some other questions:

• How did the other languages managed? is there any workaround?
• Why is this procedure and software mandatory now for Spanish language?

Understand that is quite weird that the third (maybe second or fourth) most spoken language in the world is not included yet…

Most languages that reached enought number of sentences to be in the voice phase (more than 5000) were the ones that provided that many strings during the campaign we run a few months ago. Unfortunately Spanish did not gather a lot (just a few hundreds).

There are other languages that were using github pull requests but currently we have found that some of them will need a cleanup in order to be useful (for the machine learning engine) and that’s why from now on we want to make sure the sentences we include are properly reviewed to avoid having to do another cleanup in the future.

The good news is that this should not stop any efforts collecting sentences, in early January, as soon as we have the tool ready we will be able to mass import them and use the tool for doing a proper review and approval.

[jumasheff]

Sorry for nitpicking, but CC0 is not Public Domain, according to Creative Commons wiki:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ
I think it could be more accurate to say that the project accepts sentences from CC0 and Public domain sources.

[lsaunders (LRSaunders)]

Hi @jumasheff I consulted with our legal team to make sure I was giving you the best answer and they let me know that CC0 is a dedication to the public domain (to the maximum extent possible). In fact, the license is called “Public Domain Dedication.” Let me know if you have any specific questions about this or would like further clarification.

[nukeador (Ruben Martin ❌ [away till Aug 31st])]

I want to note that we have just launched the sentence collection tool

Common Voice Sentence Collection Tool launch

Hello everyone, I’m super excited to announce that after a few months of intense work, today we launch the Sentence Collection Tool site for all Common Voice contributors. We are considering this a first beta version, but fully functional after some weeks of testing. All sentences submitted, reviewed and validated using this tool will be incorporated into the main Commmon Voice site. We will point this as the way to submit sentences to the project moving forward. What is this tool? This tools…