“The Cisco Foundation is excited to support this scalable, technology-driven initiative that makes sure even the most vulnerable people are heard during the COVID-19 crisis,” says Erin Connor, the Critical Human Needs Portfolio Manager at the Cisco Foundation. This project builds on a successful pilot project funded by the Cisco Foundation, which developed machine translation and open-source language datasets in six additional languages. “Feedback from communities is too often ‘lost in translation’ and does not lead to operational changes in humanitarian action.” “This technology – used responsibly – will ensure that humanitarians process what people are telling them on the ground more effectively” says Patrick Vinck, Kobo inc Co-Founder. KoBo Inc will then integrate this technology into KoboToolbox, a popular field data collection tool among humanitarians. In collaboration with local researchers, TWB will gather a wide range of voices for a small collection of basic words. TWB will first model languages for speech recognition in the Democratic Republic of Congo, like French and Congolese Swahili. is urgently needed and will help ensure voice recognition technology is a key part of communicating with speakers of marginalized languages and with those who have lower literacy levels, especially during COVID-19.” “This collaboration with Cisco and KoBo Inc. “We must listen to the voices of people that have historically been marginalized due to the languages they speak,” says Grace Tang, Gamayun Program Manager at TWB. This tool ensures that the voices of people living through humanitarian crises are heard, even during a pandemic. With the COVID-19 pandemic, humanitarians are struggling to engage people living in vulnerable situations as access is reduced and movement is restricted. Humanitarians will be able to use this integrated tool to engage people and conduct assessment on a wide range of topics, including people’s views on coronavirus, their access to food and water, and what languages they speak and understand.Īutomated language support will allow people to communicate with humanitarians more accurately, efficiently, and safely. Through the collaborative initiative, TWB and KoBo will develop speech recognition technology and speech-to-text mechanisms to integrate with data collection and management tool. The initiative is part of TWB’s ongoing strategy to develop language technology for people with lower literacy and KoBo’s Inc mission to provide accessible yet powerful tools for humanitarian data collection and management. with funding from the Cisco Foundation, will develop automatic speech recognition technology to help humanitarians better collect data from speakers of marginalized languages in low-literacy contexts. Translators without Borders (TWB) and KoBo Inc.
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