Minister for the Gaeltacht, Galway based Sean Kyne has launched a new campaign at the Irish language festival, Oireachtas na Gaeilge, which aims to ensure new technology services and products are available through Irish.

 ‘Míle Glór’, a thousand voices, is an initiative from Irish Language technology project, ‘Abair.ie’, which is aiming to record 1,000 people speaking Irish. The recordings, of people from each dialect and of different ages, will be used to develop Irish language versions of services such as virtual assistants ‘Siri’ and ‘Alexa’.

Minister Kyne says Míle Glór is an exciting project which will be pivotal in developing Irish language versions of tech services such as voice recognition programs and virtual assistants.

By gathering recordings of Irish speakers of different ages from Gaeltacht areas and from outside of Gaeltacht areas, the team at Abair.ie, based in Trinity College, will produce the data needed for Irish language-enabled versions of tech products and services.