Cool beans! Three artificial intelligence (AI) projects have been announced “which will lead to the use of the Maltese language in industry to be on par with foreign languages in everyday life.”

The announcement was made by Economy and Industry Minister Silvio Schembri. “With an investment of more than €161,000, they will lead to the Maltese language being written, understood, and processed in the technology we use every day. This was stated during a press conference portraying a successful collaboration between the Malta Digital Innovation Authority (MDIA) and the University of Malta,” the statement read.

The projects

AI is being explored as an assistive took within the education and industry sectors. The three projects are called Speech Processing, Text Processing and Edu AI.

1. The ‘Speech Processing’ project, researchers are assisted in making the systems understand the spoken language, so that it can be processed and translated into action. Through this assistance, over 100 hours of data will be created to help with language processing.

2. Through the ‘Text Processing’ project, researchers will be strengthening the relevant technical tools so that written Maltese is understood and processed.

3. Meanwhile, the ‘Edu AI’ project is exploring how Artificial Intelligence can serve as an assistive tool in the education sector. Children will be constantly interacting with technology, where it will assist them in academic development, thus instilling in them the importance of Artificial Intelligence from a young age.

Chatboxes and beyond

These projects will aid companies in using the Maltese language even in chatboxes on their online customer care service. “When a company adopts an automated online customer care service, to this day this is done in a foreign language. Now we have made the tools so that the Maltese language can also be integrated and used like other languages. Thus, if a customer writes in Maltese, the chatbox will be able to understand the language and reply in Maltese,” said Minister Schembri.

He also mentioned another example of text processing related to watching a movie with subtitles. As Minister Schembri said, “Until today, we all have to choose English or Italian or French, but Maltese has never been an option. Thanks to this tool, Maltese can now be integrated as one of the languages that can be used as subtitles.” Just imagine – watching your favourite TV shows with Maltese subtitles. Cool, right?