Macsen: A Voice Assistant for Speakers of a Lesser Resourced Language

Allbwn ymchwil: Cyfraniad at gynhadleddPapuradolygiad gan gymheiriaid

Fersiynau electronig

Dolenni

This paper reports on the development of a voice assistant mobile app for speakers of a lesser resourced language – Welsh. An assistant with a smaller set of effective but useful skills is both desirable and urgent for the wider Welsh speaking community. Descriptions of the app’s skills, architecture, design decisions and user interface is provided before elaborating on the most recent research and activities in open source speech technology for Welsh. The paper reports on the progress to date on crowdsourcing Welsh speech data in Mozilla Common Voice and of its suitability for training Mozilla’s DeepSpeech speech recognition for a voice assistant application according to conventional and transfer learning methods. We demonstrate that with smaller datasets of speech data, transfer learning and a domain specific language model, acceptable speech recognition is achievable that facilitates, as confirmed by beta users, a practical and useful voice assistant for Welsh speakers. We hope that this work informs and serves as a model to researchers and developers in other lesser-resourced linguistic communities and helps bring into being voice assistant apps for their languages.

Allweddeiriau

Iaith wreiddiolSaesneg
Tudalennau194-201
StatwsCyhoeddwyd - Mai 2020
DigwyddiadLanguage Resources and Evaluation Conference - Marseille, Sbaen
Hyd: 11 Mai 202016 Mai 2020

Cynhadledd

CynhadleddLanguage Resources and Evaluation Conference
Teitl cryno(LREC 2020)
Gwlad/TiriogaethSbaen
DinasMarseille
Cyfnod11/05/2016/05/20
Gweld graff cysylltiadau