Rebecca BrahdeIsle of Man

EMILY SMITH

Chris Bartley is developing speech to text technology

A PHD student developing Artificial Intelligence speech recognition technology for Manx Gaelic said he hopes it "lightens the load" for some native speakers.

Chris Bartley, a computer science student at Sheffield University, has been developing a machine-learning model which aims to transcribe the language.

He also hopes the resource would be able to be used as an educational tool to help people learn pronunciation, as well as to enable screen-readers used by visually impaired people, to read the language.

Bartley believes Manx Gaelic can be "marginalised as a a result" of the limited learning resources and things like text to speech technology or speech recognition can help with "revival efforts".

"I hope it is useful and that it can lighten the load for some native Manx speakers," he told the BBC.

The 2021 Population Census found that about 2,200 people spoke Manx Gaelic, however, efforts have continued to increase the uptake of the language since.

'Increase productivity'

Bartley hopes the technology can support and improve current projects such as Culture Vannin's initiative - an organisation that promotes local culture - to ask a native speaker to transcribe old recordings every year.

"That can take hours and hours, and I think it is a situation where technology could increase the productivity of that person, and then that person can do something else like teaching the language or creating a course.

"There is lots of potential there - not to replace people, but be an addition to the creativity of the community," Bartley said.

"There's a massive community behind Manx that are really driven to the revival of the language and to create resources."

The technology's pronunciation of Manx Gaelic is informed by the data that Bartley feeds it.

He said: "When considering what data to give it, I need to make sure it is good Manx."

The tool was also "really important because if you have a visually impaired person, as it stands, unless they participate in a completely spoken session, Manx is pretty much inaccessible to them," he said.

"So text-to-speech technology extends the availability of Manx to them," he continued.

Bartley, who has been learning Manx since 2023, said that he had made Culture Vannin aware of the tool, and he said he hopes to make it available to access online.