The humanoid robots Ažuolas and Liepa belonging to the Vilnius University (VU) are attracting a lot of attention because of their appearance and because they try to speak Lithuanian. But there is much more hidden behind the fun entertainment - projects that have been going on for almost ten years, the aim of which is to increase the availability of digital products and services operating in the Lithuanian language. VU scientists' project "LIEPA-2" on October 26. won the "Road of Progress 2023" contest of the best projects of the last decade organized by the Ministry of Transport and earned the title of the most civil project.
What is special about the "LIEPA-2" project, to which more than 70 researchers from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics and Philology of VU have already contributed? Its results can be divided into two parts: information technology solutions that allow us to create services for use by each of us, and infrastructural solutions that include a speaker of Lithuanian spoken language, a mobile synthesizer and a mobile speech recognizer.
"It all started with the LIEPA project, during which solutions were developed mainly for personal computers, and in the LIEPA-2 project we moved to the mobile medium: mobile smartphones, tablets and even robots. Therefore, the results of the "LIEPA-2" project can be divided into two parts: infrastructural services and services intended for users", says Gediminas Navickas, a researcher at the Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies of the VU Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics.
The "LIEPA-2" project is not just a vision of the scientists of the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics and Philology of VU - it is already a product used in society. The synthesizer developed during the first project is used by Delfi and Vilnius city municipalities on news portals to make the articles public, announce the announcements of Vilkaviškis buses at the station. Another example is "Tilde's Voice" - the first Lithuanian spoken language recognition app. It recognizes both the texts dictated to the device and the spoken commands, in addition, it pronounces the texts in Lithuanian. Text messages, notes and emails can be dictated using this app. letters, speak addresses in Google Maps, Waze and other navigation apps. This program was developed by the company using the resources created during the LIEPA and LIEPA-2 projects.
"We have to talk to things in Lithuanian and that is possible," says Linas Aidokas, a researcher at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of VU, who pays a lot of attention to how the activities of robots can be applied in learning processes. This month, he attended the AcaDay conference, which is dedicated to the community working on the robots NAO and Pepper. VU's Oak and Liepa are from the NAO robot family. At the exhibition, there was a discussion with robot manufacturers about the possibility of integrating into robots and officially supporting their communication in Lithuanian. "At the event, I was able to establish closer relations with scientific representatives due to possible cooperation in reviewing scientific articles in the field of robotics and cooperation in future projects," says L. Aidokas.
These are the first steps towards the "LIEPA-3" project, which would focus on nurturing and preserving the Lithuanian language in the digital medium.
