104
edits
Changes
added fx voice stuff
== June 8th, 2020 ==
* '''Smart Development Hack''' -- In April the EU along with several government and corporate partners [https://ec.europa.eu/international-partnerships/news/coronavirus-eu-calls-smartdevelopmenthack_en announced] “[https://toolkit-digitalisierung.de/en/smartdevelopmenthack/ Smart Development Hack]”, a global hackathon to find and fund innovative solutions that could boost response to coronavirus. The ten winners out of over a thousand entries included “[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr0ikab5Gqg Mbaza - an AI Based COVID-19 Chatbot]”, which will provide access to valuable COVID-19 information in plain language on any phone at any time. Mbaza is the work of [https://digitalumuganda.com/ Digital Umuganda], a startup in Rwanda that has been working with us as part of our Common Voice and Deep Speech community. Using the [https://www.newtimes.co.rw/technology/rwandan-startup-wins-over-rwf3-billion-covid-19-hackathon award funding] Digital Umuganda will be able to develop speech recognition for under-represented languages Kinyarwanda and Swahili, and contribute to the broader impact of our voice work.
* '''Android Assistant exploration''' -- The Scout team at Mozilla has been exploring voice assistants for a while. We've put a lot of work into [https://voice.mozilla.org/firefox-voice/ Firefox Voice Beta], on desktop, where we recently released version 0.20, including contributions from over 60 contributors ([https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-voice github]). But some of you might be also interested to know we've been exploring options for an open-source, privacy preserving alternative Android voice assistant. [https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-voice/tree/master/android-app Firefox Voice on Android] is a technical proof of concept, and we're continuing a lot of user studies and explorations to understand the potential for this project.
* '''ET Speaker Series''' -- We regularly host a series of timely and topical speakers to provide Mozillians with insights into research happening broadly in the world. You may not know that all of those talks are collected and shared as a [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnRGhgZaGeBu_vwhJmaL953ZA8c5vuQ7h playlist] on Mozilla’s YouTube channel. Most recently we were delighted to host [http://www.baeza.cl/ Ricardo Baeza-Yates] to talk about Bias on the Web. His [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brr8cZHf2ec talk] takes a data scientist’s view of bias and talks about the responsibility to address bias in science, a topic that’s always of impact but understandably getting considerable increased attention today.
