Official BSC press release announcing Matxa — the first open voice synthesis model covering the main dialect variants of Catalan (central, north-western, Balearic, and Valencian). Quoted as BSC’s voice specialist on the significance of the release.

Mariola Dinarès interviewed me on Popap / Catalunya Ràdio (3Cat) as co-developer of Catotron — the first neural network-based open-licence speech synthesis engine in Catalan — framing it as a foundational step toward Catalan-speaking voice assistants.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra covered Catotron as the first freely available neural TTS system for Catalan, developed by Col·lectivaT in collaboration with TALN (UPF) and UPC researchers, funded by the Catalan Government’s Department of Culture.

The online publication Pensem, invited experts to write a series of articles with the topic “Catalan, in the digital world.” I was fortunate enough to be asked also and I have written an article concerning the importance of free software and the efforts of the open source community specifically within the field of language technologies. Here is an English translation of it, I apologize ahead of time for the possible mistakes.

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.