Jóhanna Vigdís Guðmundsdóttir, CEO of Almannarómur, discusses the Icelandic language and the 'Reddum málinu' campaign in the latest episode of Kaffispjallið.
Almannarómur is a non-profit foundation established in 2014 by 25 companies and institutions with the aim of ensuring that Icelandic continues to exist in the digital world. Jóhanna Vigdís Guðmundsdóttir, the CEO of Almannarómur, has overseen the project since its inception. The annual campaign to collect the voices of Icelanders, Reddum málinu (Let's Save the Language), recently concluded. It is an important part of the journey to secure the future of the Icelandic language in the digital world. This year, 333 companies participated, and a large number of Icelanders contributed their voices as data for speech solutions.
“People naturally tend to use English or other languages because they have no other options if we don't have these speech solutions in Icelandic. This is the way we have to ensure the future of our language,” says Jóhanna Vigdís about the main purpose of the campaign. “That is the role of Almannarómur, and then Almannarómur was made the Centre for Language Technology in 2018, under a service agreement with the Ministry of Education and Children. We have a fund that we are responsible for investing in research and development in language technology and creating this infrastructure, which is the foundation for further innovation in this field,” she says.
Why don't you just hire professional readers? “The technology needs to understand more than just professionals. It needs to understand all of us. That's why we set up this site in 2018 with the aim of collecting voices. To crowdsource the collection of voices. Language technology is so much about data, having as much data as possible. Just like artificial intelligence in general. We need the voices of everyone, of all genders and ages. Children and teenagers, for example, have a different frequency range than adults.”
Jóhanna says that women are considerably more diligent in contributing to the project and recording data. “We need more male voices. This competition shows us that women are still the most diligent readers; they make up 70% of those who have recorded,” she says, mentioning that the campaign has been very successful this year. “We have received 250,000 new sentences into the database this week. 333 companies have participated, and a large number of people have made an effort to read.”