I agree with you, their common voice project is extremely important. From the outside it seems like the engineering effort behind this is done -- They just need to keep the site running to keep collecting data. Actually, now that I think about it, validating the data might be a lot of man hours.
I very much hope they don't abandon it, the common voice project is arguably more important than their speech to text engine. There are competing open source speech to text engines. There is no other project like common voice that I am aware of.
"validating the data might be a lot of man hours."
It totally is and therefore also a very good crowdsourced project. And they set up already a nice website with badges and other things motivating people to contribute. Daily 15 minutes of a lot of people would mean lots of validated data. Because with user accounts you can also validate userquality etc.
I very much hope they don't abandon it, the common voice project is arguably more important than their speech to text engine. There are competing open source speech to text engines. There is no other project like common voice that I am aware of.