Welsh language better prepared for artificial intelligence developments, thanks to Welsh Government investment

Since the publication of the Welsh Language Technology Action Plan in late 2018, the Welsh Government has created and commissioned resources and data to improve technology in the Welsh language. It has also supported the development of voice technology in Welsh, and the development of Welsh language in A.I.

Some of the plan's achievements include developing technology to turn spoken Welsh into typed text, creating synthetic voices for people who lose the ability to speak, developing specialist machine translation, and working with the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, to improve how their most powerful chatbot, GPT-4, processes the Welsh language.

As part of the Welsh Government’s partnership with Microsoft, they have also collaborated to create a simultaneous interpretation facility within Microsoft Teams meetings. This facility is provided at no additional cost to existing Teams users. Work continues with Microsoft to further develop this facility with the hope that this will lead to the creation of similar and new resources for languages spoken around the world, based on the work here in Wales.

The Minister for Education and Welsh Language, Jeremy Miles, said:

“We want to ensure that anyone can use the Welsh language in technology in more and more situations, without having to ask or go out of their way to do so.

“The three themes of the Plan back in 2018 were Welsh language speech technology, computer-assisted translation, and conversational artificial intelligence. We have taken the task seriously, and ground-breaking work has been done to ensure that the Welsh language is at the heart of digital developments.

“We have come a long way. But of course, technology is evolving. As this happens, we will continue to ensure that Welsh language technology resources are also evolving.”