Elhuyar presents its work on language technologies and artificial intelligence to the European Parliament

Elhuyar, a LANGUNE member, attended the European Parliament and presented its work conducted at the Orai artificial intelligence centre. At 10:00 Jon Abril-Olaetxea, Elhuyar's general coordinator, and Igor Leturia-Azkarate, head of Orai speech technologies, appeared before the Intergroup on Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Elhuyar had been invited to attend by François Alfonsi, a Corsican MEP of the Greens-European Free Alliance.

Elhuyar has made its experience and track record available to other minority languages in Europe. The two attendees reported on their work in the field of language technologies and artificial intelligence (the Elia machine translator, the Aditu speech recogniser, and the TTS speech synthesis service, among other things).

Elhuyar has a track record spanning over 20 years in these fields, and they have long been aware of the importance they all play in the development of our language. That is why and with this aim in mind they set up Elhuyar’s artificial intelligence centre Orai a year and a half ago. Digitisation facilitates the accessibility and dissemination of Basque, and not only of Basque but of any other language, too. “We live in a digital society, and the future of a language that is not strong in the digital arena will be very serious. Digitisation is an element that has to be taken very much into account in the processes to revitalise languages. The major languages in Europe, such as French, Spanish or German, are also aware of this, because the threat of English may lead to the loss of many functions and users of their languages. This threat is even greater as far as minority languages are concerned,” said Jon Abril-Olaetxea, general coordinator of Elhuyar.

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