Google Partners with Howard University on Black Voice Dataset

Google has begun working with Howard University in an endeavor called Project Elevate Black Voices to build a speech dataset for Black Americans, who have been historically underrepresented in speech. Black people in the United States often have a worse experience using automatic speech recognition technology when compared to white speakers, researchers have found.

Project Elevate Black Voices aims to make it easier for Blacks to use ASR, Google stated.

Google will perform user experience research to collect input from blacks in the United States, providing infrastructure for data collection, funding, and obtaining licenses to use the data commercially. Howard University will coordinate with other black colleges and universities, manage vendors, recruit participants and maintain the repository.