I'm not sure about Mozilla's efforts in STT, but they were lagging pretty far in TTS. [1]
Google/Baidu, universities, and an assortment of Chinese/Japanese/Korean social media companies (Line, etc.) are posting the most compelling TTS research, models, and code. Mozilla's TTS system [2] is an amalgam of some of these models, but it lags pretty far behind state of the art.
Mozilla should focus on getting additional revenue streams. We can help them out by trying to get Congress / DOJ to strip Google of its ability to have and maintain a browser with which they entrench their search and advertising moat. I think they're clearly in antitrust/anticompetitive territory.
[1] I'm pretty familiar with this field as I wrote https://vo.codes and https://trumped.com TTS systems. Neither of those are state of the art in terms of mean opinion score (MOS), but they're incredibly efficient.
It is explainable given that there was a single developer working on TTS. It is hard to compete with big academic teams/industry players this way.
I also believe Mozilla team was restricted by a lack of computing resources. They had just a single 8GPU server or so.
This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.
We need a SETI@home approach to open source AI models.
Only then we can break our dependency on Google and Facebook - and Mozilla for that matter.