This Tuesday, June 27th, Balidea will have the honor to participate in the META-FORUM 2023 in Brussels, a reference event in Europe in the field of digital equality of languages. We were invited to present our contributions to the Strategic Research, Innovation and Implementation Agenda for achieving full digital equality in European languages by 2030 (SRIA). These contributions were funded by the ELE (European Language Equality) program through its open call.
Among Balidea's main contributions to the Strategic Agenda is the creation of a guide on how to design SLU datasets in resource-poor scenarios. To this end, we have established the main requirements for the design of SLU datasets and propose quality measures to ensure their success, even in resource-limited contexts and for minority languages.
On the other hand, we have contributed with a guide on how to design data collection campaigns focused on target users. We provide practical recommendations to ensure the quality of the samples collected and the effectiveness of the campaign.
We will also share lessons learned through our campaigns, with the goal of helping others maximize the effectiveness of their initiatives. We will present the methodologies we developed to validate the collected datasets. And finally, we will transfer applicable quality measures on the collected datasets, to fit the specific needs of our projects.
FalAI experience: Galician voice collection project
In addition to years of experience in the development of virtual assistants and language technologies, our contribution to SRIA has been based on the success of the FalaAI project, which seeks to collect voices in Galician with the aim of training algorithms that allow people to communicate in this language with the digital world.
The initiative, led by Balidea and the AtlanTTic research center of the University of Vigo, has been a success of public-private collaboration and has managed to collect 250,000 recordings, making it the world's largest open dataset base for virtual assistants in any language.
The campaign remains open, so you can continue to contribute through the website https://falai.balidea.com/. In addition, campaign data can be consulted in real time.
Years of research and development of conversational assistants
Balidea's R+D+i area has been committed for years to the development of Language Technologies, which makes us a reference in the field of Voice Conversational Assistants, both for Galician and Spanish.
We have specialized in two specific fields: conversational assistants for the support and monitoring of chronic patients (telemedicine) and conversational assistants for the support and assistance to citizens in administrative processes (e-Administration, e-Government).
