I agree that this should be documented better but looking at their terms of service, the recordings submitted look to be under CC0 [1].

The relevant blurb:

    Your Contributions and Release of Rights
    
    By submitting your recordings, you waive all copyrights and
    related rights that you may have in them, and you agree to
    release the recordings to the public under CC-0. This means
    that you agree to waive all rights to the recordings
    worldwide under copyright and database law, including moral
    and publicity rights and all related and neighboring rights.

[1] https://voice.mozilla.org/terms

It looks like the database will be open sourced later this year: https://voice.mozilla.org/faq

I'm wondering if the format will be easily translatable to the kinds of models that software like CMUSphinx and Julius use

https://cmusphinx.github.io/

http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php

I would assume they are only going to be doing the raw data collection and maybe cleanup and annotation, and that data should be made available so you can train what you like.

If you poke around github and the Kaldi lists a bit more you can see that they are experimenting with and probably planning to use Kaldi.

I wonder what they plan to do for provisioning. It is one thing to collect data and train models, but quite another to make the service available over the web in an unlimited capacity. And we are not yet to the point where you can reasonably expect to run a high quality open-vocabulary STT system in your browser. The search network is typically in the GBs range.

It's weird to me that they publish the project about having an open dataset of voice data, with only a promise the open it up later.

It's Mozilla, they likely just don't have the infrastructure/code in place yet. They definitely get my trust for believing they actually will. They have been very good in the past about keeping things open. They make mistakes sometimes, but their goals are all about being open.

thanks for the vote of confidence! yes we will absolutely open this data up, and it's just a matter of collecting enough data to be useful, and then building the UI. we have a goal of achieving this by the end of 2017, so stay tuned!

Great feedback, we can look into clarifying on our homepage that our entire goal is to create a dataset in the public domain. We want people to donate not just to Mozilla, but to the world :)

Yes, the data will be made freely available.