Mozilla has partnered with the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The partnership seeks to gather open speech data in voice technology for African Languages. This project is in a bid to develop local innovation ecosystems for voice-enabled products and technologies in Africa.
Mozilla is an open-source web browser launched in 2002 that allows users to search for content seamlessly on its platform.
The company co-hosted an Ideation Hackathon Project in Kigali early this year. The aim is to create a speech corpus for Kinyarwanda using AI. The AI project seeks to solve the lack of freely available voice data in individuals languages that will help to train AI-powered Speech-to-Text engines.
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Thus, the partnership was birthed in a bid to solve the challenges and train a Deep speech project that will be available for all.
The Deep Speech Project seeks to collect language data in Kinyarwanda, an official language in Rwanda. The language is also spoken by 12 million people across Rwanda, Eastern Congo and the southern part of Uganda.
The duo will partner with several African startups in need of training data to develop locally suitable and voice-enabled products or technologies.
The German Ministry and Mozilla share a similar vision to automate decision-making and Artificial Intelligence for sustainable development in Africa.
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