The Regional Goverment presents the first three tools of the 'Nós' project for the interaction of people and devices in Galician language
The new instruments were made public yesterday at an official ceremony held in the Fontán Building of the Cidade da Cultura.
A multilingual neural translator made in Galicia, the first voice recogniser that understands spoken Galician and converts it to text, and a voice synthesis application capable of reading Galician from a text. The Xunta de Galicia made public yesterday the first three available tools of the 'Nós' project, an initiative to bring Galician to the society and economy of the 21st century and developed entirely in two structures of the USC, the CiTIUS and the ILG (Instituto da Lingua Galega). The new tools will enable interaction in Galician between people and technological devices, and will soon be available openly and free of charge to any person, company or project that needs them or wishes to use them.
The rector of the USC, Antonio López; the director of the Singular Centre for Research in Intelligent Technologies of the USC (CiTIUS), Senén Barro; the director of the Institute of the Galician Language (ILG), Elisa Fernández; the Regional Minister of Culture, Education, Vocational Training and Universities, Román Rodríguez; and the director of the Agency for the Technological Modernisation of Galicia (Amtega), Julián Cerviño, presented these new tools yesterday, Monday 5 June, in the Fontán Building of the Cidade da Cultura.
"We are taking a first visible step by making some of the results of the project accessible," said Antonio López. "The 'Nós' project connects humanities and technology, in this case, through language", continued the rector, to then underline that "this is the most ambitious project for our language looking towards the future". The project aims, said Antonio López, to place Galician on an equal footing with other languages with greater potential, through tools that generate constant learning and appropriate solutions. "This is not the end, it is only the first step", he concluded.
For his part, the scientific director of CiTIUS, Senén Barro, stressed that "the 'Nós' project was born from the USC and the Xunta with the desire to create an innovative Galician ecosystem in language technologies for the world". "Data are like a country's road infrastructure," he said, "the basic building materials that must be properly prepared," he explained.
Finally, the director of the ILG presented the functioning of the tools which, as she pointed out, were selected on the basis of their high demand.
These advances will allow not only to reinforce the external projection of Galician, "but also the economic expansion of the Galician language as a vehicle for communication in global markets", said Román Rodríguez. An example of the applications could already be seen in the institutional announcement that the Xunta de Galicia launched on the occasion of the Día das Letras Galegas 2023, where the first ever speech in Galician language generated by artificial intelligence thanks to the capabilities developed within the framework of this project was presented.
USC and Xunta de Galicia will continue working on the compilation of voices that reflect the great phonetic and dialectal variety that exists throughout Galicia, which will allow further improvement of the current models of tools, while new multilingual models will be developed in cooperation with the equivalent projects to 'Nós' for the rest of the languages of the State. Initially promoted by the USC and the Xunta de Galicia, the 'Nós' project was later included in the PERTE New Economy of Language.
Project 'Nós': Galician language at the forefront
To place Galician in the society and economy of Artificial Intelligence'. This is the main objective of the 'Nós' project, whose efforts are focused on generating the necessary resources to place Galician at the forefront of Intelligent Technologies, especially in those areas related to Linguistic Technologies and, in general, in the society and economy of Artificial Intelligence.
In the framework of this initiative, resources are compiled and high quality tools are developed for the automatic processing of Galician, both spoken and written. In addition, general demonstrators will be produced to show the possibilities of each of these resources, and use cases with a high socio-economic impact will be developed in different contexts.
The resources developed in 'Nós' will be freely accessible by third parties, which will allow and facilitate the development of final products and services based on the Galician language by companies, institutions and organisations, both public and private, that wish to do so.
The project is part of the Galician, Spanish and European strategies aimed at developing technologies, tools and applications for the projection and use of languages in the fields of application of AI. The 'Nós' Project is a project of the Xunta de Galicia whose implementation was entrusted to the USC, through the ILG and CiTIUS.