25 years of speech technology innovation

Cambodian Project

The Cambodian Stories Project is a remarkable initiative aimed at preserving the oral histories of Cambodians, particularly those affected by the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Jeff Adams explains how his team at Cobalt Speech and Language collaborated with Brigham Young University (BYU) to develop a Cambodian speech recognition system. This project not only preserves cultural heritage but also advances speech technology for lesser-resourced languages 1.

We have here a situation where lesser resource languages, where we have now thousands of hours of high quality recordings with good transcriptions for a big chunk of them, I thought, those are the ingredients you need to develop a speech recognizer.

--- Jeff Adams

The collaboration involves students learning about speech technology while contributing to a meaningful cause, highlighting the potential for similar projects in other languages 2.

   

Data Challenges

Acquiring data for building speech technology for less-represented languages presents significant challenges. Jeff Adams notes that access to appropriate data is a major obstacle in developing speech recognition systems, especially for languages with fewer speakers 3.

It's hard to get, for these lesser represented languages, it's hard to get sufficient data that's labeled appropriately to be able to build the kind of technology that we already are starting to enjoy.

--- Jeff Adams

This challenge underscores the need for innovative solutions to bring the benefits of speech technology to all language communities, not just the major ones.