Catalan language and speech technologies in 2021
in Blog / En
I have spoken on the stream/panel organized by the Catalan local goverment.
Catalan is one of the languages in Europe which feels the threat of the digital divide due to the rapid pace of innovation in language technologies. Luckily the local government Generalitat is very conscious on the subject and has been supporting various initiatives to ensure that Catalan language is represented both in the innovation efforts and products in the market.
As a part of the awareness efforts the Language Policy General Management (Direcció General Política Lingüística) of Generalitat have organized a stream, outlining the government led initiatives on giving support to open innovation on speech technologies. People, experts in their fields were invited to explain the recent developments and the projects they were involved in, and I was very fortunate to be a part of this group of experts.
I talked about Catotron, the first open neural TTS models in Catalan, and partly about the first Catalan virtual assistant assistent.cat (based on Mycroft) together with Joan Montané of Softcatalà. Later together we have answered questions concerning open source, and open data initiatives concerning speech technologies.
The stream was opened by Ester Franquesa, the director of DGPL, hosted other important actors of the field Maite Melero and Marta Villegas from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Xavier Fisa from Lavínia Next.
