[utunga]

I work with Mozilla's DeepSpeech every day. Mozilla's STT is critical to the survival of important indigenous languages throughout the world.

I sincerely hope we can help make this project continue and that Mozilla can help us do that.

Ensuring indigenous languages have digital representation is essential to their survival. Speech recognition and synthesis are a vital part of that. Indigenous communities are often ignored by Big Tech because they bring little financial value to their bottom lines, but financial bottom lines are not everything. Culture is more important. Open source tools like DeepSpeech allow communities to build the tools they need for themselves.

Māori have been working to help build tools for te reo Māori, and our project is at the forefront of using open source tools like DeepSpeech to revitalize the Māori language. The core of a good speech recognition system helps us in many practical ways, such as improved transcription, support for pronunciation, correct announcements in public transport, correct information on maps and in many other ways. We may well continue to support and use DeepSpeech if the project can continue.

But there are also many other projects in other countries in the world who may follow on - such as the Kabyle people of Algeria who are using DeepSpeech, or the Mohawk nation in North America who have been looking into it.

By the way we are working on our web presence but for now this quick one pager gives some idea of the work we are doing - https://papareo.nz.

[nshm]

Is your current data public? Do you have sufficient amount of untranscribed data (1000+ hours)? We could help you.