OrienTel – Arabic speech resources for the IT market

A survey of the language resources market clearly shows that the Arabic language is still a stepchild of international R&D efforts in the field of speech recognition. OrienTel for the first time makes an effort to create speech data on a large scale. It does so by profiting from the experience of previous SpeechDat projects and from the European Commission’s policy to embrace non-EU Mediterranean and surrounding countries. The participants of OrienTel will collect Standard and Colloquial varieties of Arabic in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Israel + Palestine, Tunisia and Morocco, supplemented by other languages of the region. Help in creating an Arabic network of speech experts is appreciated.