On Sunday, 19th October 2025, the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group held a practical training session for its community volunteers on Mozilla Common Voice an open knowledge project designed to make voice technology more inclusive and representative of the world’s linguistic diversity.
The training took place in Tamale and it brought together both new and experienced community members who share a passion for language, technology, and open knowledge.
The session began with a brief overview of the Common Voice project, where participants learned about its mission to build publicly available voice datasets that anyone can use to develop voice-enabled technologies. Fuseini Musah (Musahfm) explained how these efforts help to ensure that voice recognition systems work for all languages, not just the dominant global ones.
Leading the session, Fuseini Musah (Musahfm) guided participants through a hands-on training on how to contribute to Common Voice. Volunteers were shown step-by-step how to add sentences to the dataset, record their own voices, and validate recordings made by others. The exercise created a lively and collaborative environment as participants practiced reading, listening, and evaluating contributions to maintain accuracy.
A key part of the discussion focused on ensuring the quality and accuracy of the recorded sentences. The group explored what makes a good contribution, from correct spelling and sentence clarity to cultural relevance and neutrality. Musahfm encouraged participants to contribute sentences that truly reflect local experiences, expressions, and everyday realities of speakers in Northern Ghana.
Beyond the technical training, the session helped participants draw connections between Wikimedia projects and language technology initiatives like Mozilla Common Voice. Both movements share a common vision: preserving and promoting local languages on the internet, ensuring that future generations can access and use technology in their mother tongues.
The participants left the session feeling inspired, equipped with new digital skills, and committed to contributing their voices and sentences to the Common Voice platform.
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