By: Julia Fitzgerald, Senior Account Manager
As Britain’s oldest language, Welsh has spent 4,000 years evolving, and although not as widely used today, being able to speak it expands a person's cultural understanding and historical knowledge of Wales, whether they are based here or not.
Growing up, Welsh is incorporated into lessons at school, and there are regular celebrations throughout the year to mark national milestones and events. However, tech always played a very small part in the culture, so in recent years I have taken up Duolingo to help improve my Welsh reading level!
Fast forward to the present day, and The Welsh government has signed a partnership deal with OpenAI as part of a plan to increase Welsh speakers in the country and help it meet its target of one million Welsh speakers and use of the language by 2050.
The deal with OpenAI, best known for creating ChatGPT, will build open data archives to contribute data to the research community, thereby improving the linguistics performance of AI models and apps and how AI technologies work in Welsh.
Developing a culture of open innovation
When the Welsh Language Technology Action Plan was created in 2018, the goal was for technological advances to allow the Welsh language to be used in a wide range of situations, using speech, keyboards or other means of interaction.
The 2018 Plan’s priorities were to develop and share new infrastructure for Welsh for:
• Welsh Language Speech Technology
• Computer-assisted translation
• Conversational Artificial Intelligence
Making Welsh language digital resources and data more accessible without limitations was also a main driver, allowing materials to be shared under a suitable licence that can support efforts to innovate digitally and benefit its future.
What’s next for the Welsh language?
Since the Welsh Language Technology Action Plan was published, the Welsh Government has funded, created, and worked on many of the components that the language needs to survive in the digital age. Today, this means looking to the next steps for Welsh language technology, and the announcement of the collaboration with OpenAI will make it more accessible for those who want to learn it.
I recently read an article that revealed neither Siri or Alexa can understand Welsh, and that goes for facts about the nation as well. I tested this out and none of my devices could respond, in fact, they couldn’t even tell me who the First Minister is, so this would be a good place to start.
Alongside the ongoing evolution of tech, the main goal of the Cymraeg 2050: A million Welsh speakers strategy is to increase the use of our language, so there’s still work to be done on the types of technologies that would help increase the use and knowledge of the Welsh language. How that will evolve in the months and years ahead will be interesting to see, and through digital platforms, AI and community driven initiatives, the Welsh language can thrive in the modern world and be preserved for future generations.