The Irish Club Of Belgium

Speech Technology and The Irish Language
7 th Samh. 2007
Article published in Irish on www.gaelport.com

A study is being undertaken for Dr. Rosemary Orr from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) by Máire Ní Shé. Participants with Irish are required.

Background to the study
Everybody has some knowledge of mobile phones and we see everyday that they are constantly developing. Nowadays there are mobile phones that are like computers. You can write and send emails and store documents on the phone. You can use phones and computers to play music and to look at television.

A new development is that you can give spoken commands to phones and computers instead of typing the command. For example, with speech only, you can save a document, make a call, or send a text message. With spoken commands you can open an automatic door, play music or enquire when the next train is traveling to Dublin. This can all be done using voice commands.

Dr. Rosemary Orr and the ETSI team wish to develop a corpus of standard spoken commands to be used in recognised voice tools. The same thing is being done for other European and World Languages.

Why do this?
If the companies who offer this technology can use the same corpus of spoken commands, customers will only need to learn them once, which would make the technology much easier to use. This is important work that could help people with special needs, for example, people who have poor sight, those who cannot read or write with ease, or people who have difficulty typing text. There are corpora for 5 languages already and the list is constantly growing. Irish should be included.

To reach a precise standard, ETSI would like to speak to language users of all the languages. In this study the interviewee will be told about a number of functions for which the keypad is usually used. Then they will be asked what are the correct terms, according to the interviewee, for those functions. For example in a call to the doctor would "Cuir glaoch ar an dochtúir" or "Glaoigh ar an dochtúir" be more correct? This study will collect the orders used by the majority of people so that keypads can be created that are as user-friendly as possible.

Irish speakers are being sought who will do an interview. The names of all participants will be put into a raffle for a prize. The interview on the phone will only take 45 minutes. All the responses to the questions will be kept in an anonymised database. If you have any queries about this project you can contact

Máire Ní Shé.
University College Utrecht
 The Netherlands maire1@casema.nl
+31 (0) 30 253 9900