Ai

TL;DR I’ve trained a small language model to bring Basque predictive text to Android. It can be used with FUTO Keyboard on a phone. Much like Google’s well-known Gboard, it can predict the next word and correct mistakes. About auto-completion Auto-completion and similar writing-assist technologies aren’t new. They’ve been with us for a long time. In recent years, however, driven by artificial intelligence, great strides have been made. These are the main options available to us today: ...

TL;DR I’ve created an experiment called NongoEuskara. To do this, I gathered data, trained a fastText classification/embedding model, and built this little demo website. Using WebAssembly, these models run directly in the browser. The long explanation We know that large language models (LLMs) are capable of doing pretty much everything. Even though they weren’t originally designed for it, today they can program, translate, transcribe audio, summarize long texts, and a long etcetera. Sometimes, however, the best solution isn’t always using an LLM. For example, for quick and simple translations, there are lighter neural translators that require far fewer resources than LLMs. ...

The Latxa model was an important milestone for artificial intelligence in the Basque language. Until then, we had no open-weight model that handled Basque decently. Since then, several others have been created specifically fine-tuned for Basque: Kimu (Orai) and the Latxa Qwen3 VL family of models recently released by HiTZ. At the same time, new top-tier local models have been emerging — Qwen, Gemma, etc. — which can be especially interesting for use in agents with external tools. These models are also improving their Basque language capabilities noticeably. But do they match the Latxa model? ...

Traditional Text-to-Speech technology gives us solid voices today, but offers no way to guide the interpretation of the audio. If we want to use these models to produce audiobooks, stories, game audio, etc., we soon realize the results are not ideal. We get cold, neutral voices. Robotic. Boring. Lately, however, models that allow us to specify paralinguistic cues (pauses, breathing, and emotional variations) are beginning to emerge. Thanks to this technology, by providing script-like instructions, we can create emotionally rich synthetic voices. ...

In recent years, text-to-speech (TTS) models have advanced enormously. Month after month, new releases improved pronunciation, prosody, and overall audio quality. Unfortunately, most of those models were designed for English, or at best compatible with only a few languages. The tools available for generating Basque voices used to be quite limited: paid proprietary systems (such as Elhuyar’s neural TTS, developed by Orai), or older robotic voices that had clearly fallen behind. ...