Abstract
Speech–driven virtual assistants, known as smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, are increasingly used. However, commercial smart speakers only support a handful of languages. Even languages for which ASR and TTS technology is available, such as many official EU member state languages, are not supported due to a commercial disinterest derived from their – relatively speaking – rather small number of speakers. This problem is even more crucial for minority languages, for which smart speakers are not expected anytime soon, or ever. In this ELG pilot project we developed a Basque–speaking smart speaker, making use of the open source smart speaker project Mycroft AI and Elhuyar Foundation’s speech technologies for Basque. Apart from getting it to speak Basque, one of our goals was to make the smart speaker privacy friendly, non–gendered and use local services, because these are usual issues of concern. The project has also served to improve the state of the art of Basque ASR and TTS technology.
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Leturia, I. et al. (2023). Basque-speaking Smart Speaker based on Mycroft AI. In: Rehm, G. (eds) European Language Grid. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17258-8_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17258-8_15
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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