Telegram has a bot that understands Mari

A chatbot that understands the Mari language has appeared in Telegram. The programme was developed by Mari linguist Andrey Chemyshev and his associates, Mariyskaya Pravda reports.

The bot is designed to convert Mari speech into text. To do this, it needs to record a voice message on a microphone or drop an audio file.

In the future, the authors of the idea plan to collect an audio corpus with speech samples in Mari language to create a separate programme for speech recognition. Now 257 hours of recordings have been collected, texts in Mari were read by 424 volunteers. Of these, 71 per cent have been verified. Chemyshev noted that by the end of the year he intends to collect at least 300 hours of recordings.

The chat-bot is in public access, it can be used for free.