ISCA Archive SIGUL 2023
ISCA Archive SIGUL 2023

ABAIR & ÉIST: a Demonstration of Speech Technologies for Irish

Andy Murphy, Liam Lonergan, Mengjie Qian, Harald Berthelsen, Christoph Wendler, Neasa Ní Chiaráin, Ailbhe Ní Chasaide, Christer Gobl

The ABAIR initiative [1, 2, 3, 4] has been providing speech technology, and its applications, for Irish language communities for many years. For Irish, as an endangered language, it is particularly important to implement speech technology, not only to offer speakers a resource for language learning and accessibility, but to maintain and preserve the very language itself. The ABAIR initiative has developed linguistic resources, text- to-speech (TTS) systems, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and many applications that utilise these technologies directly. This paper demonstrates and discusses the TTS and ASR technologies created, and provides a glimpse at the applications being developed in parallel.