AI Project
S'gaw Karen TTS/STT AI Model
Preserving language through technology — building text-to-speech and speech-to-text AI for the S'gaw Karen community.
Project Timeline
January 2026
Karieng Language Service founded with the vision of bridging communication gaps for the Karen community in Australia and beyond.
February 2026
Built an Android application that will allow volunteers to record their voices as they are reading Bible texts
February 2026
Released the application on Google play and start recruiting volunteers to start making contribution
31 March 2026
To be able to train a decent STT model, we will need at least 1000 hours of recordings
1 April 2026
Began research and development of the S'gaw Karen TTS (Text-to-Speech) and STT (Speech-to-Text) AI model, partnering with linguists and native speakers for data collection.
Mid April 2026
Release a web site for people to try out generating voices (TTS) and texts (STT).
May 2026
Aim to release the Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text web and API service.
June 2026
Once the TTS and STT are good to go, the next phase is to start building training dataset for English to Karen training.
June 2027
Once we have 100,000+ sentences translated it is time to train the AI.
January 2029
Once we are happy with the quality of the translation, we will release the application.