Common Voice Project

If you've been reading my blog since the early days, you might know that one of my dreams is to become a voice actor - professional or otherwise. I've uploaded a few of my blog posts in vocal form before and thoroughly enjoyed doing it.

I've met people in my life who have told me that they're totally weirded out by hearing their recorded voices. I think the idea being that the voice which we hear resonate inside our heads is not the same as what is projected into the common world for others to hear.

I've gotten over my voice sounding weird in recordings. What I haven't gotten over is the feeling that I rarely, if ever, truly speak with my voice from the heart; meaning that I often think about my conversations with people (literally every day) and how often my voice sounds "fake".
I think it's like singing. If you practice speaking from your truth, instead of from your frontal lobe, then you eventually get better.

So anyway, I randomly stumbled upon this thing called the Common Voice Project when I opened up my browser today. It's a crowd-sourced database spearheaded by the amazing Mozilla community - the makers of Firefox no less -  and they aim to build a free repository of human voices for use in things like apps and engines.

What a great way for me to practice my voice acting! Sure, I don't get paid for it and sure, I get little to no recognition, BUT I get to instantaneously listen to my voice in real time. Plus, I also help out struggling developers and new English learners, if they happen to listen to one of the sentences I've enunciated.

I encourage you to check it out if you're bored and feel like giving a minor contribution to human technological advancement.