The Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki) is working together with the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) and the Finnish State Development Company (Vake Oy) in the Donate Speech campaign (Lahjoita puhetta). Experts from Aalto University and the University of Turku have also participated in the project.
The goal is to gather 10000 hours of ordinary, casual Finnish speech that can be used for studying language as well as for developing technology and services that can be readily used in Finnish. In this project, particular attention has been paid in order to allow for both academic and commercial use of the material under given terms.
Speech is donated via the web browser or mobile app that offers a selection of tasks under fun themes that can inspire and encourage you to talk. The app was developed by Solita.
All variants of spoken Finnish are welcome, including the speech of second-language Finnish learners. As long as you speak some Finnish and can understand the Finnish information and instructions in the app, you can donate!
The speech material donated during the campaign will be stored in the Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki), coordinated by the University of Helsinki.
The speech material can be redistributed to individual researchers, universities and research organizations or private companies that need it for studying language or artificial intelligence, for developing AI solutions or for higher education purposes related to the aforementioned areas.
Read more about processing personal data in the Donate Speech campaign (in Finnish) and the privacy practices of the Language Bank of Finland.
NEW: The first datasets collected in the Donate Speech campaign are available in the Language Bank of Finland.
For academic researchers, the use of the data is free of charge, similarly to the rest of the services of the Language Bank of Finland. For commercial use, a fee will be charged in order to cover handling costs. All users must comply with the data protection terms and conditions of the resource.
You can find some examples of research topics in the Researcher of the Month archive of the Language Bank of Finland.
Please contact the email address lahjoita-puhetta (ATT) kielipankki.fi.
