On March 28, 2024, the Central Finance and Contracting Agency adopted a decision to approve the amendments to Contract No. 5.1.1.2.i.0/1/22/A/CFLA/008 submitted by the IT Competence Center and to grant support to SIA “ZZ Dats” and SIA “RGP” for the research project “Development of a Latvian Language Speech Recognition and Dictation System Solution to Ensure Quality and Accessibility in the Social Services Sector.”
The objective of the project “Information and Communication Technology Competence Center” is to increase the competitiveness of businesses in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, in collaboration with scientific institutions, by June 30, 2025, by conducting at least 12 sector-specific and interdisciplinary studies in the fields of Business Process Analysis Technologies and Natural Language Technologies, with the result that at least 10 businesses will develop and implement new products and technologies in production.
SIA “ZZ Dats,” in collaboration with SIA “RGP” and SIA “Rehabilitation Center ‘Tērvete’,” launched research project No. 2.3 on April 1, 2024:Development of a Latvian Language Speech Recognition and Dictation System Solution in the Social Services Sector to Ensure Quality and Accessibility” within the framework of IT Competence Center Project No. 5.1.1.2.i.0/1/22/A/CFLA/008.
The project’s objective is to develop a text dictation and editing system for use in the social services sector in the form of an open, horizontally scalable, cloud-based platform that integrates an automatic speech recognition and transcription system with an artificial intelligence model adapted to the Latvian language and the social services sector. The model will be designed to be compatible with and replaceable by similar models for other languages. The platform would significantly reduce the time and resources required to create and verify case descriptions for social services clients, thereby improving the quality and accessibility of the service provided to the relevant target groups.
Employees of SIA “ZZ Dats” will participate in all project activities and ensure the definition of solution requirements, as well as the development of the architecture, including the platform’s compatibility with SOPA, the municipal social assistance and social services administration application. SIA “ZZ Dats” will participate in the preparation and anonymization of datasets, utilizing resources available from the use case partner. In accordance with the architectural design, it will implement the back-end components of the dictation platform and develop the user interface. SIA “ZZ Dats” will perform validation of the developed platform in a test environment.
SIA “RGP” will ensure the development of the speech recognition API design. The company will provide training and initial evaluation of language and speech recognition models, as well as training and evaluation of the latest generation of speech recognition neural models. SIA “RGP” will ensure the development of a speech recognition API prototype and its subsequent validation in an experimental environment.
The collaboration partner, SIA “Rehabilitation Center “Tērvete””, will contribute its expertise in the provision of social services and provide resources for research purposes: Latvian-language speech, text, and lexical resources relevant to the social services sector (social rehabilitation), and an experimental environment for validating the solution developed in the project.
Main planned activities of the project:
- development of the solution architecture design;
- creation of a dataset for machine learning and evaluation of results;
- development of tailored speech recognition and text post-processing models;
- implementation and validation of the platform in a real-world operational environment.
Planned project outcomes:
- two original scientific papers;
- two reviews;
- one set of language models;
- one validation report;
- one platform prototype.
The project is being implemented under the Latvian Recovery and Resilience Facility Plan, Reform and Investment Priority 5.1.r. "Increasing Productivity through Increased Investment in R&D," Reform and Investment Direction 5.1.1.r. the reform “Innovation Management and Incentives for Private R&D Investment,” sub-measure 5.1.1.2.i. “Support Instrument for the Development of Innovation Clusters,” within the framework of the operational program.
Total project costs: EUR 230,985.76; planned support: EUR 153,238.53. Project duration: 12 months, from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025.
