Honoring Kiswahili with Technology and Communit (Talk by Kathleen Simunyu)

This talk gives an indepth look at Mozilla Common Voice’s Kiswahili work – an initiative to bring a vital language of East Africa online, and to make voice technology accessible to Kiswahili speakers. The talk will cover an introduction to the Mozilla Common Voice platform, community building, including how we have worked to address gender challenges and the inclusion of speakers of related dialects and variants of Kiswahili, the challenges and successes of building an open-source Kiswahili speech data set, the research questions we have explored along the model development roadmap and our efforts to disseminate and encourage the use of the resources created in this work.