This autumn, a campaign to collect Estonian speech has launched in Estonia. The goal of the ”Anneta kõnet” campaign is to develop language technologies and to help to preserve the Estonian language.
All adult Estonian speakers, including those who speak Estonian as a foreign language, are invited to participate in the project and donate their speech through the ”Anneta kõnet” campaign website. With the help of a large number of participants it would be possible to compile a corpus with contemporary and diverse speech, including examples from different Estonian dialects.
The ”Anneta kõnet” campaign was launched by Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications (MKM) and the State Information System Authority (RIA). The project has received funding from the EU NextGenerationEU recovery plan.
”Anneta kõnet” campaign has similar goals as its predecessor ”Lahjoita puhetta” campaign, which was launched in 2020 to collect spoken Finnish. After it proved successful, a similar campaign for collecting Finland Swedish, ”Donera prat”, was launched in the end of 2021. All these ”Donate your speech” campaigns aim to compile language-specific and open speech corpora, which would in the near future benefit researchers as well as developers of speech technology, applications and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Anneta kõnet – About the project
