Miguel Afonso Caetano“The Saving Voices Project recently built a speech AI system for the Indigenous Soliga tribe in southern India. As younger members migrated to the cities for jobs, elders in the community feared losing their language. With a small number of speakers, no written script, and no internet access, commercial speech technology was not an option. The Saving Voices Project, along with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Dharwad, custom-built cheap text-to-speech AI models that run on low-powered devices, and can operate offline for long periods.
The model is replicable for Indigenous language preservation globally, Sathiaseelan said.
“With just five hours of voice data, we were able to build a voice model for the Soliga by prioritizing community ownership, and with frugal, deployable technology,” he said.
Unlike the compute-heavy AI models developed by Silicon Valley, the smaller models being built in India, Indonesia, and elsewhere can run on low-end devices and low-bandwidth networks, and be deployed in sectors such as agriculture, health-care, and education. The models are not only cost-efficient, they also have a lower impact on the environment, Sathiaseelan said.
“This is perhaps the most important dimension of frugal AI,” he said. “It is about building leaner, more efficient systems from the ground up. By design, the systems use less compute, less memory, and less energy, which directly translates into a smaller carbon footprint.”“
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