The AI-based software takes an input of spoken Gaelic and then prints it as text. It was developed by a team of linguists and AI specialists at the university. Next, the researchers hope to step up the game and produce a Gaelic version of voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, which use the spoken word for input and output.
The researchers fed a neural network with millions of clips of spoken and written words in Gaelic, training it to recognise the relationship between spoken and written Gaelic.
The project goes back to the 1990s, when Dr William Lamb was working on a PhD in grammatical variation in Gaelic and constructed the first linguistically annotated corpus of Scottish Gaelic. This involved annotating 80,000 words by hand. Returning to the University of Edinburgh many years later, he revisited his work and used it to develop a website which provides tools to analyse words and structures in Gaelic sentences.
Speaking to the...