They want to build technologies which bring access for everybody. There is a huge population of people who can't type easily and where speech is an important alternative. Having all input running through an ad company (Google) or requiring to buy premium products (Apple) isn't good for an inclusive society valuing privacy.
Quoting their mission statement:
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
However Mozilla seems like it did too many wrong bets and didn't execute well (see also FirefoxOS)
The world needs a state of the art and easy to integrate library for providing speech to text so that we don't have to rely on sending all of our voice data to the big tech giants. I imagine this was the motivation behind it.
That being said, I think the current open source options are actually okay and constantly getting better. They're certainly a lot better today than they were 3 years ago.
The thing is, good speech to text AI needs good training data. And lots of it. With as little error as possible.
They were also doing this. And made an easy to use website, where you could contribute and people did.
I cannot imagine it was soo expensive that they now have to throw it under the bus.
I agree with you, their common voice project is extremely important. From the outside it seems like the engineering effort behind this is done -- They just need to keep the site running to keep collecting data. Actually, now that I think about it, validating the data might be a lot of man hours.
I very much hope they don't abandon it, the common voice project is arguably more important than their speech to text engine. There are competing open source speech to text engines. There is no other project like common voice that I am aware of.
"validating the data might be a lot of man hours."
It totally is and therefore also a very good crowdsourced project. And they set up already a nice website with badges and other things motivating people to contribute. Daily 15 minutes of a lot of people would mean lots of validated data. Because with user accounts you can also validate userquality etc.
You've actually touched on something very important here: Mozilla seems to be getting its fingers into more than it can handle. It wants to do everything but ends up doing a lot of things fairly poorly.
I switched away from Firefox to Brave yesterday. Became tired of how Firefox threads would consume 99% of my CPU endlessly until they're manually killed. This happened about four or five times a day, I'd only notice when performance of everything else tanks. I wish Mozilla would direct more resources towards Firefox than Lockwise and all the other half-baked junk they're spending developer time on.
