Teaching Machines to Speak Frisian: A PhD Success Story

We’re thrilled to announce that Phat Do has defended his PhD thesis: “Praat mar Frysk (mei amper data): Speech synthesis for low-resource languages with cross-lingual transfer learning” (downloadable here)

You can talk to a virtual assistant on your phone in English, Spanish, or Mandarin… what about Frisian? Or the thousands of other smaller languages spoken around the world? This is the challenge Phat took on.

His breakthrough: building high-quality speech synthesis models for Frisian using as little as 20 minutes of audio. By leveraging cross-lingual transfer learning, he’s opened doors for speech tech that includes smaller language communities.

This isn’t just about tech. It’s about digital equity and language preservation. Phat’s work, supervised alongside my Dr. Jelske Dijkstra and Dr. Esther Klabbers, proves that every language deserves a voice in our digital future.

Congratulations, Dr. Do! 🎉