Saving Fading Dialects with AI

Contemporary AI readily handles standard Japanese, yet dialects remain problematic; whether it can understand the Yamagata vernacular is still uncertain. As dialect speakers age, this valuable linguistic culture is fading. To address the issue, we partnered with Nishikawa Town in Yamagata Prefecture and held auditions to select local residents as dialect coaches. The chosen participants recorded dialect audio, producing training data for Whisper (speech recognition) and ChatGPT (natural-language processing) so that these AIs can learn the Yamagata dialect.