Under the Gaelic ASR Bonnet

Old Island Voices friend, Will Lamb, delivered some fascinating insights into the development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Scottish Gaelic in a recent seminar for the Soillse inter-university research network. In a step-by-step approach, he outlined the progress made so far, the current state of the art, and plans for further development to a local and international audience representing a range of languages in addition to Gaelic, including Basque, Friulian, and Maltese.

His talk was recorded, and you can view it on the Island Voices Videos YouTube channel:

Will has also made a PDF of his presentation available for anyone who wants to study it in detail. This includes live links to other online sites and resources for further background reading (or viewing).

Here at Island Voices we have, of course, been following the progress of this development closely for some time, and were very pleased to contribute substantially to its initial phases through the provision of our own collection of ready transcribed recordings, which Will generously acknowledges.

The benefit has been mutual, as the ASR project has in turn provided Island Voices with the impetus to develop the subtitling of our videos using the YouTube Closed Caption option. It was nice to see a sample Island Voices clip used in Will’s presentation, as well as one from the Ceòlas collection!