Pashto, Abkhaz, and Kabardian were the fastest-growing datasets in the latest MCV release

I was interested to see which datasets grew the most between Common Voice 24.0 and 25.0, so I compared the release notes from the common-voice GitHub repository and learned that Pashto, Abkhaz, and Kabardian were the fastest growing.

The Pashto dataset, which is the largest dataset of the entire Common Voice corpora at 97.81 GB, grew as a result of the community recording ~2.4M new clips.

The Abkhaz dataset grew out of a partnership between the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Abkhazia, Abkhaz State University, and the Shinkuba Abkhaz Language Development Foundation, and more than 800 new contributors contributed over 150 hours of new data. Over 1% of the Abkhaz population has now contributed to Common Voice, which is an amazing milestone to reach.

The Kabardian dataset, which includes 6 variants and 7 accents, added 56k new clips this release, bringing it to 291 hours of speech data from 347 speakers.

I am constantly inspired by what coordinated, community-driven efforts can do to reshape the default thinking around technology into a more global perspective.