If the Internet doesn’t understand your language, your access to the world online is severely limited. As part of a broad effort to improve online access, Mozilla, the web browser company, created Common Voice, an opensource database of languages that is populated by people who speak them. By then feeding this data into voice recognition software, computers are enabled to understand new voices and provide services to them. For the benefit of approximately 18 million speakers, Mozilla is now adding Twi, Ghana’s most popular language, to this database. Twi is the 100th language to be added to Mozilla’s Common Voice. It joins other African languages Kiswahili, Luganda, Hausa, Tigrinya, Tigre, Igbo, and Kinyarwanda on the project, though each is at a different level of validation based on the volume voice samples users have contributed.
SOURCE: QUARTZ AFRICA