It also won the award for Best Positive Impact Campaign.
The FalAI project has just been recognised with the Paraugas de Ouro 2023 award, one of the special prizes in the VIII edition Paraugas Awards, held this year at the Teatro Jofre in Ferrol, which rewards outstanding initiatives in the field of marketing and communication at Galician level. It also won the prize in the Best Campaign with Positive Impact category.
The Paraguas Awards are organised annually by the Galician Communication Cluster, which is made up of 233 entities, including companies, associations and technology and training centres. These awards aim to highlight the diversity and strength of the most innovative and creative advertising and communication projects with the greatest positive impact. This year's winners were selected by a jury of experts who highlighted the quality of this year's almost 300 proposals, from which a total of 55 finalists were selected.
Achieving the goal of raising voices in Galician
Balidea and the AtlanTTic Research Centre (University of Vigo) launched the FalAI initiative with the aim of collecting examples of Galician voices that would allow us to train artificial intelligence for specific domains such as health, care or administrative procedures. We relied on Recados Carmen advertising agency to carry out the necessary publicity campaign for this challenge. A campaign was launched on different platforms to reach all audiences. In just a few weeks, it reached and exceeded its target, with more than 260,000 recordings and the participation of around 12,000 people.
Recados Carmen understood the challenge perfectly and managed to match their creative idea with the emotional charge we saw and felt in the project. We couldn't be happier or prouder of this achievement. Congratulations to Recados Carmen and everyone involved! Thanks to your work, we can say that we have the world's largest open database of virtual assistants in any language, with a total of 250 hours of recordings.
Best result for an emotionally charged campaign
From Balidea and AtlanTTic, we wanted to convey the importance of being able to communicate with the digital world in any language and especially in those with few resources, as is the case of Galician. We wanted to do this from the point of view of people who might be excluded, highlighting their vulnerability.
The two main spots produced by Recados Carmen managed to capture the essence of the campaign in their 55 seconds. Starring actress Aurora Maestre, “Llama a mi nieta” and “Que día de la semana es” captured our hearts. With excellent acting and just the right amount of drama, they clearly show two situations in which a person can be excluded from the digital world. The Paraugas Awards are therefore a great tribute to the hard work, dedication and commitment that this project has meant for everyone involved.
The FalAI project also had a strong campaign on social networks, mobilised by the hashtag #A30frases (#30SentencesAway) and supported by influencers and personalities from the Galician audiovisual sector, such as Esther Estévez from TVG programme Dígocho eu or Virtudes, la Repunante, represented by journalist María Foscaldo.
Linguistic equality in Europe
Balidea, together with AtlanTTic, was selected by the European Language Equality (ELE) initiative to contribute to language equality in the digital environment in Europe. In this context, the FalAI initiative and its dissemination campaign were born.
Their results were presented in Brussels at MetaForum 2023, Europe's leading event on digital language equality, as contributions to the Strategic Research, Innovation and Implementation Agenda for achieving full digital language equality in Europe by 2030. Among these contributions is the creation of a guide on how to design SLU datasets in resource-poor scenarios, using the recently awarded FalAI campaign as an example.
The FALAI project is still active through the platform falai.balidea.com. If it has touched your heart, you can continue to contribute. Remember, we are thirty sentences away from the machines speaking Galician.
