Share your voice recordings with Google to improve speech machine learning technology
Voice recordings, native language, and any optional demographic information submitted to Google may be used to improve Google products and services, including audio recognition and speech technologies.
If you opt-in to open sourcing your contributions, your data may also be shared publicly for use by the larger research community. Note that you may choose to opt-in or opt-out of open sourcing your data at any time, however, Google won’t be able to locate or delete copies that others may already have made once shared publicly.
An example use of this data would be to teach machines how to understand voice commands or to speak various languages using appropriate pronunciation. For example, your voice recordings could be used to improve the pronunciation of street names when using the voice navigation feature in Google Maps.
Possible other applications of this data include:
• Accessibility features for disabled populations: Users with speech impairments can use this technology to help improve language learning and proficiency
• Translation pronunciation: Text-to-speech translations are more likely to be pronounced correctly
• Voice commands: Google products can use this technology to better interpret and understand user voice commands
When you submit a recording, Crowdsource collects your audio data, the segment of text you read aloud, associated language information, your country and any optional demographic information you’ve added. This helps Google ensure that the voice recognition and text-to-speech databases have a truly global representation. It also helps us build voice recognition and voice synthesis technologies that will allow machines to understand and speak to people in their local style and pronounce the names of places and businesses properly.
When you send an audio recording to Google, it will be automatically deleted from your device after being uploaded (such as when you connect to Wi-Fi or immediately if you’ve turned on cellular data usage from the Crowdsource app’s settings). If you would like to delete your submitted recordings from Google’s servers as well, you can do so from the “My Uploads” page in the Crowdsource app at any time.
If you choose not to share your recordings with Google, your recordings will be immediately deleted from your device.
In certain cases, your audio submissions may be deleted by Google because they contain restricted material or have been deemed unusable. Your submissions will be deleted if they contain any of the following:
- Sensitive or personal information: Audio containing information that reveals identity (for example, credit card number, phone number, etc).
- Children and/or minors: Audio from anyone under the age of 18.
- Offensive or sexual content: Hateful, defamatory, and offensive language or audio that captures pornography, sexual acts, or violence.
- Copyrighted content: Recordings containing audio that you do not own (for example, copyrighted music, movies.).
- Excessive noise or silence: Recordings that do not include a detectable voice due to excessive background noise or the absence of an audible speaker.
For more information on how Google shares and manages information, see Google’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.