Original Story Published by: Jonathan Greig, Staff Writer, www.zdnet.com
Photo Source: KT Press
The Mozilla Foundation announced on Wednesday that it will be offering $400,000 in grants for voice technology projects based in Kenya, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The foundation is looking for projects that solve agricultural and financial problems while using Mozilla's Common Voice Kiswahili data set. It is planning to give awards of up to $50,000 to each of the winning projects, which they hope will show how voice-based tools can be integrated into apps that provide agricultural or financial services.
Mozilla Common Voice is an open-source initiative aiming to make voice technology more inclusive. The initiative was started because voice technology is quickly becoming prevalent across a range of digital sites and services. But often, these services only provide voice-technology in English, French, Spanish or German.
Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Home all do not support a single native African language, meaning millions of people who speak Kiswahili and other African languages can't use voice technology to do something as simple as checking the weather -- or something as important as checking for COVID updates.
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