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Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning

Promotion Phat Do: how to build a computer voice for small languages?

Language and multilingualism

Mercator

PhD candidate Phat Do (Language Technology and Culture) defends his dissertation on Language and Speech technology for small languages at Campus Fryslân.

How do you build a computer voice for languages that have little training data? Phat Do from Campus Fryslân is earning his PhD on that research question. For his PhD, the Vietnamese doctoral candidate developed a Frisian computer voice. Dr Jelske Dijkstra from the Fryske Akademy is his co-supervisor, Prof Hans Van de Velde of the Fryske Akademy is one of the opponents at the thesis defence.

Phat's research 
Phat is giving voice assistants like Siri a Frisian twist with his dissertation, "Praat mar Frysk (mei amper data): Speech synthesis for low-resource languages with cross-lingual transfer learning". While speech tech thrives in major languages like English and Chinese, Phat proved it can work for small languages too. With surprisingly little data, he built two speech models that can pronounce Frisian sentences—an exciting step for minority languages. 

Using clever training methods—like starting with Dutch before switching to Frisian—he created models with as little as 20 minutes of Frisian audio. The results are promising and freely available. Though still in development, Phat’s work shows that even small languages can join the tech conversation.

Promotion
Phat will defend his dissertation on Thursday, 19 June 2025. The defence will start with a Laypeople’s Talk at 10:30, followed by the official ceremony at 11:00. The event will take place in the auditorium of the Beurs building, Campus Fryslân (Wirdumerdijk 34, Leeuwarden), but can also be followed online.

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