Mozilla’s Common Voice now features 60 hours of speech datasets in eight new Indigenous languages. Meet the Taiwan Language volunteers at RightsCon on February 27, 2025, in Taipei As thousands of languages face extinction, linguistic and heritage preservation has never been more critical. In Taiwan, a grassroots volunteer community is utilizing Mozilla’s Common Voice platform — the world’s largest public participation open speech dataset, to preserve Indigenous languages and help build inclusive, voice-enabled AI solutions. Common Voice, a volunteer-led initiative with over 200 languages ..read more

The Common Voice team is honoured to be able to announce that the 20th version of our multilingual, open speech dataset is now available. This dataset release sees Aragonese, IsiNdebele (sometimes also known as Southern Ndebele), Southern Sotho and Tupuri to the dataset for the first time. The dedicated language activists, translators and contributors for these new languages have done amazing work creating open speech data for their languages that anyone can build on. These new languages bring the total number of languages in the Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset to 133 in total. This rele ..read more

For over a decade, Mozilla Fellowships have sought to nurture talent at the intersection of technology and society. Launched in 2011, our fellowships program has grown into a recognized catalyst for some of the most celebrated leaders in open source innovation, public interest tech, and tech policy. From debunking myths about AI to exposing targeted disinformation campaigns in Kenya, our 200+ Mozilla Fellows have been at the forefront of some of the most critical conversations about technology and its impact in today’s society. Building on our experience and lessons learned over the past 10 ..read more

In order to better support a globally distributed community of dataset users, developers, language activists and voice contributors the Common Voice team is launching a Discord server. You can join the Discord community now by clicking here. Why Discord? The team wanted to balance using a communications tool that was already in widespread use with what technologies are being used and supported by other Mozilla teams. By using Discord we hope to allow community members from Mozfest, MDN, MozAI and other technology andor language communities to join us with less friction. We also wanted to pick ..read more

In order to better support a globally distributed community of dataset users, developers, language activists and voice contributors the Common Voice team is launching a Discord server. You can join the Discord community now by clicking here. Why Discord? The team wanted to balance using a communications tool that was already in widespread use with what technologies are being used and supported by other Mozilla teams. By using Discord we hope to allow community members from Mozfest, MDN, MozAI and other technology andor language communities to join us with less friction. We also wanted to pick ..read more

MozFest House Zambia took place on November 20-21, 2024 at the Lusaka International Conference Center. Over 500 technologists, activists, funders, and creators gathered to explore the transformative potential of collective action towards ethical, open, and equitable AI that serves communities across Africa. MozFest House Zambia was a testament that joy, imagination, and solidarity are a critical part of the equation of how we get there. In today’s interconnected and complex systems, the process of creating solutions is as important as the solutions themselves. MozFest House Zambia exemplified ..read more

At MozFest House Zambia, Skoll Foundation brought together technologists, policymakers, and activists who are implementing AI solutions on the continent to provide a ground-up perspective on the technology’s impact. The discussion illuminated the nuances of AI’s role in Africa. Practical Implications The conversation kicked off with examples of AI’s practical applications. Bright Simons from mPedigree explained how his organization uses AI tags to provide quality control for drugs as they move along the production process. He also talked about sensors that monitor the storage conditions of te ..read more

Grounded by our own open source roots, Mozilla has long funded open source technologies that help to untangle thorny sociotechnical issues. From the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program’s funding of critical building blocks of the open source ecosystem to the Data Futures Lab’s support of new data governance models, and the Mozilla Technology Fund’s cohort of projects employing AI to address environmental impacts, we’ve fueled a broad and impactful portfolio of technical projects. Like other parts of the Foundation, we’re now thinking about the next era of Mozilla’s grantmaking that bui ..read more

Study of booming market shows how sharing and exploitation of health and biometric data fuels everything from insurance hikes to workplace discrimination (BUDAPEST, HUNGARY, NOVEMBER 20) — Health-related cybersecurity breaches and ransom attacks have skyrocketed more than 4000% – from 18 incidents in 2009 to 745 in 2023 in the United States only, targeting a booming market of body-centric data expected to exceed $500 billion by 2030, according to new research from Mozilla Fellow, Júlia Keserű. Keserű’s research, "Skin to Screen: Bodily Integrity in the Digital Age”is part of her senior Fel ..read more

An ethnographic research into the datasets powering maternal healthcare app “DawaMom” used across Zambia and other Southern African countries (LUSAKA, ZAMBIA | MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2024)— Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are expected to strengthen access to quality healthcare, offering new opportunities to improve maternal health. In Zambia, where a newborn dies every 30 minutes and a stillbirth occurs every hour in certain regions, AI-driven solutions are perceived as a crucial lifeline in reducing maternal and child mortality rates. Research published today by Min’enh ..read more