Small indigenous languages of the world are often spoken in regions where literacy rates are low and access to digital services is limited. Whereas voice information services could be useful for low literate speakers of these languages, written and audio data from these languages are hardly available. This paper presents […]
Speech technology
9 posts
The Open International Webinar Artificial Intelligence in & for the Global South – What is AI and what can it be used for? took place online, from 02-04 June 2021, with 145 participants from Asia, Africa and Europe, including master students from VU Amsterdam (Netherlands), UDS (Ghana) and UNIMAS (Malaysia) […]
Amsterdam 23 May 2019 – The annual symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”, organized by Victor de Boer and Anna Bon, was focused this year on transdisciplinarity — collaboration between academics and non-academics — in search of solutions for the Global Challenges of our Age. The theme was reflected in the talks by […]
AOPP and the W4RA team will continue collaboration on the topic of Food Security in rural Mali, focusing on the information and knowledge sharing, which is necessary to improve value chains for seeds. This project is made possible through a recent grant from Nuffic in the OKP NFP-TMT-RC program, for […]
Despite the fact that more than 70% of Africa’s population depends on agriculture for basic life needs, and in Africa’s drylands rain-fed agriculture is widespread, reliable meteorological data about rainfall and weather forecasts — in Europe timely and accurate — is often not available for African farmers. Recent studies in rural areas of […]
Amsterdam, 19 June 2018 – The Kasadaka “talking box” platform, the winning concept, is a platform to develop voice-based technologies for those who are not connected to the Internet, cannot not read and write, and speak underresourced languages. Kasadaka has been developed to allow development of specific, context-sensitive content, in […]
A BBC web article “‘Siri, will talking ever top typing?’ By Padraig Belton features our work done on voice interfaces for farmer information in Northern Ghana. Francis Dittoh talks about the need for specific information for farmers in their own language and discusses ongoing research into our Kasadaka system. Anna […]
The W4RA team at VU is proud to present three new master theses: by Justyna Kleczar (July 2017), Reshmi Sarkar (June 2017) and Jamila Daoudi (May 2017). Justyna Kleczar’s work is on speech technologies for underresourced languages. It comprises a new methodology, including very comprehensive tooling, which facilitates and allows […]