My name is Iran Davar Ardalan, and I'm a storytelling technologist.
This evening, I spent some time with ChatGPT. I've noticed that the Persian language is not supported in many voice AI and text-to-speech
applications and I want to know why. I think it's an important language to include for global diversity — especially now when many voices in Iran have been silenced.
Our conversation is super informative. ChatGPT breaks it down pretty well. It says these are a few reasons why:
1) Persian is not as widely spoken as some other
languages, so there may be less demand for it.
2) Developing support for a new language
can be a complex and time-consuming process, and companies may prioritize adding support for
languages that are more widely spoken.
3) There may also be a lack of high-quality data and resources
available for training AI models on the Persian language.
But we also talk about why we need to fix this: To improve access to information and for the preservation of the Persian.
1) AI can be used to improve access to information in the
Persian language by creating tools such as machine translation, text-to-speech, and
language processing tools.
2) With the help of AI, it will be easier to preserve the Persian language
by creating accurate and up-to-date resources such as dictionaries, corpora, and language
models.
I did this today, because together with women in voice AI from around the world, this week, we published an Amazon Alexa skill that honors influential Iranian women through poems, stories and music.
Our skill is called Freedom Speaks. Join us at our launch event on February 9 at 2pm ET to learn more:
It's simple, just say “Alexa, open Freedom Speaks!” to make history come alive.
With Freedom Speaks we want to also highlight the absence of Persian speech in training datasets. We want to explore how Voice AI can be improved for the Persian language in the service of empowering Iranian women.
Through voice AI, we bring the words of iconic Iranian women poets and writers from the past to life. A storyteller for the modern world, Freedom Speaks can inspire others to leverage it as a tool for freedom of expression and to provide a platform for voices from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
I asked ChatGPT if it had heard of Freedom Speaks and the fact that we have included stories and poems about remarkable Iranian women.
ChatGPT: "I am not aware of any specific Alexa Skill called Freedom Speaks but it is great to hear that you are working on creating a dataset of Persian stories and poems about remarkable Iranian women. It is important to create diverse and representative datasets to help train models like mine to better understand and generate text in the Persian language.
Such an Alexa skill will be a great addition to the Persian language dataset, and it will help raise awareness about the importance of having a diverse dataset. Creating a diverse dataset is key to making sure that the model understands the complexity and nuances of the Persian language and culture. It's also important to ensure that the data is well-curated, high-quality, and free from biases.
This can help to improve the performance of models like mine and make them more useful for a wider range of tasks. It's great to see that you are working to help improve the state of the art in natural language processing for the Persian language, keep up the good work!"
#FreedomSpeaks
