Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Voice assistants and auto-captions are everywhere now, but they can quickly fall apart when someone speaks with an accent the system wasn’t trained to recognise, or in a language it rarely “hears”.
In this episode of the SLV LAB Conversations podcast, we were joined by technologist, linguist and researcher Kathy Reid who unpacked why that happens and what can be done about it. She introduces Mozilla Common Voice, a community-led project that collects speech in hundreds of languages and dialects. Kathy also talks through the Mozilla Data Collective and what it could mean for libraries and other cultural institutions facing constant scraping of online collections.
See omnystudio.com/listener (omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.
Voice assistants and auto-captions are everywhere now, but they can quickly fall apart when someone speaks with an accent the system wasn’t trained to recognise, or in a language it rarely “hears”.
In this episode of the SLV LAB Conversations podcast, we were joined by technologist, linguist and researcher Kathy Reid who unpacked why that happens and what can be done about it. She introduces Mozilla Common Voice, a community-led project that collects speech in hundreds of languages and dialects. Kathy also talks through the Mozilla Data Collective and what it could mean for libraries and other cultural institutions facing constant scraping of online collections.
See omnystudio.com/listener (omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.
