(The first clip I got was spoken more or less correctly, but a couple of words are slurred together and the prosody is awkward. Without having a good idea of the standards and goals of the project, I have no idea whether including this clip would make the overall dataset better or worse. My gut feeling is that it's good for training recognition, and bad for training synthesis.)

This seems to me like a major issue, since it should take a relatively small amount of effort to write up a list of guidelines, and it would be hugely beneficial to establish those guidelines before asking a lot of volunteers to donate their time. I don't find it encouraging that this has been an open issue for four years, with apparently no action except a bunch of bikeshedding: https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/273

One speaker, who sounded like they were from the mid-west United States, was dropping the S off words in a couple clips. I wasn't sure if it was misreads or some accent I'd never heard.

Another speaker, with a thick accent that sounded European, sounded out all the vowels in circuit. Had I not had the line being read, I don't think I'd have understood the word.

I heard a speaker with an Indian accent who added a preposition to the sentence that was inconsequential but incorrect none the less.

I hear these random prepositions added as flourishes frequently with some Indian coworkers, does anyone know the a reason? It's kind of like how American's interject "Umm..." or drop prepositions (e.g. "Are you done your meal?") and I almost didn't pick up on it. For that matter where did the American habit of dropping prepositions come from? It seems like it's people in the North East primarily.

[¹] If that's even fair given it's a dialect in its own right - Americans also say things differently than I would as a 'Britisher'

I'd say it's mostly subtler (I suppose that should be the expected distribution!) things I've noticed though, they're just harder to recall as a result.

(Just want to emphasise I'm not making fun of anybody or saying anything's wrong, in case it's not clear in text. I'm just enjoying learning Hindi, fairly interested in language generally, and interested/amused to notice these things.)

Hindi is much more economical, to put it literally, one says things like 'than/from/compared to orange, lemon is sour', and 'orange is little/less [without comparison] sour'.

Which, I believe, is what gives rise to InE sentences like 'the salt in this is very less' (it needs more salt, there's very little).

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.commonvoice.saverio/

[2] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/discussion-of-new-guidelines...

Thanks for taking time to contribute!

Maybe you could convince a couple of indie creators or state-run programs to licence their audio? But I'm not sure if negotiating that is more efficient than just recording a bit more audio, or promoting the project to get more volunteers.

It would still be an uphill battle to convince them to hand over the training set but the legal department can likely be convinced if the data set they contribute back is heavily chopped up audio of the original content, especially if they have the originals before mixing. I imagine short audio files without any of the music, sound effects, or visual content are pretty much worthless as far as IP goes.

I'm not sure that is a clear copyright violation. Sure, at a glance it seems like a derivative work, but it may be altered enough that it is not. I believe that collages, and reference guides like cliff notes are both legal.

I think a bigger problem would be that the scripts, and even the closed captioning, rarely match the recorded audio 100%

Also I don't think there have been any major court cases about this, so there's no clear precedent in either direction.

Easy fix - keep a bloom filter of hashed ngrams ensuring you don't repeat more than N words from the training set.

What might work better is using closed captions or subtitles, but I've also seen enough cases where those don't exactly match the actual speech either.