ISCA Archive SIGUL 2023
ISCA Archive SIGUL 2023

Developing TTS and ASR for Lule and North Sámi languages

Katri Hiovain-Asikainen, Javier De la Rosa

Recent innovations in speech technology have made high quality TTS and ASR available even for extremely low-resource languages. This paper presents our updated work-in-progress report of an open-source speech technology project for two indigenous Sámi languages that are minority languages in Norway, Sweden and Finland. At this stage, we have designed and collected text and speech corpora for training the first neural text-to-speech (TTS) for Lule Sámi. We will update the previous North Sámi TTS by collecting additional materials and by training a new model using state-of-the-art technologies. We also describe our first experiments with developing ASR for North Sámi and discuss the next steps to be taken in our project.