This Sunday, August 17, the new edition of the Interspeech conference kicks off. It is the most important annual conference in the field of voice technologies. Part of the Aina Project technical team will travel there to present and share the latest technological developments. The conference is held in Rotterdam and during 4 days brings together researchers from all over the world under the motto “Fair and Inclusive Voice Science and Technology”.
Optimization of resources and the promotion of their adoption
This is a key milestone for the Project in which the scientific interest of the research carried out by the technical team is recognized. Specifically, during the conference, key aspects such as the improvement of speech synthesis techniques or the study of how the models work in scenarios where language is changed in the same conversation will be presented. In addition, this last challenge, known as “code-switching” in the scientific community, represents one of the crucial elements that affect the performance of voice technologies in bilingual or multilingual environments.
In fact, researchers from the Aina Project work with companies and institutions to facilitate the adoption of the resources generated within the framework of the Project and available in the Aina Kit . It is within the framework of this adoption process that the improvement of processes such as code-switching plays a fundamental role. At the same time, it is considered one of the key aspects to ensure good performance of the models.
In this sense, the congress will also be an opportunity to bring together other lines of research such as the integration of Aina models in the field of video games. The technical team is studying how, through the open source technologies generated by the Project, an interaction can be achieved entirely in Catalan and that allows the user to enjoy the experience of video games with Aina technologies. This is research that was made public in the last edition of the SAGA congress and that was received with great interest by the entire community.
The sessions and presentations throughout the congress are a great opportunity to exchange experience among the scientific community, while exploring new perspectives for the development of future language resources in Catalan through Projects such as Aina, promoted by the Generalitat de Catalunya and developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) .
