Achí Speech to Text: Preserving a Mayan Language with AI

The Achi' Language and Its Speakers

Achi' (Achi' ch'ol) is a Mayan language spoken by around 100,000 people, primarily in the municipalities of Rabinal, Cubulco, and San Miguel Chicaj in Guatemala's Baja Verapaz department. It is closely related to K'iche', but maintains its own identity with distinct grammatical features and a rich oral tradition. The language uses a Latin script with diacritics to represent glottalized consonants (e.g., t', k', q') and long vowels (e.g., aa, ee). However, many speakers are not literate in Achi', relying on oral communication. This makes speech to text a powerful tool for documentation, education, and inclusion.

Why Accurate Achi' Transcription Matters

Accurate transcription of Achi' audio serves multiple purposes:

• Preservation of oral history: Elders hold knowledge of traditional stories, ceremonies, and agricultural practices. Transcribing these recordings ensures they are not lost.
• Language education: Schools in Achi' communities can use subtitled videos to teach reading and writing in the native language.
• Accessibility: Deaf or hard-of-hearing Achi' speakers can access spoken content through captions.
• Media production: Local radio stations and YouTube creators can add subtitles to reach a broader audience.

Without reliable speech to text, these tasks fall to human transcribers, who are scarce and expensive. Speechyou fills this gap with an AI model specifically adapted to Achi'.

Challenges in Achi' Speech Recognition

Achi' presents several phonetic challenges for ASR systems:

• Glottalized consonants: Ejective sounds like 'k'' and 't'' require precise articulation. They are often confused with plain stops by models not trained on Mayan languages.
• Vowel length distinction: Short and long vowels change meaning (e.g., 'k'ak'' (new) vs. 'k'aak'' (fire)). The model must detect duration differences down to tens of milliseconds.
• Low resource: Only a few hours of transcribed Achi' speech exist in public datasets. Training a system from scratch is nearly impossible.

Speechyou overcomes these by using a phoneme inventory that includes all of Achi' distinctive sounds, and by applying transfer learning from K'iche' and other Mayan languages. This yields high accuracy even with limited data.

Use Cases in Practice

• Community radio: A station in Rabinal broadcasts daily in Achi'. Using Speechyou, they generate transcripts for their website, allowing listeners to read along or search archives.
• Oral history project: A local NGO records interviews with elders about traditional medicine. Speechyou transcribes the audio in real time, reducing manual work by 90%.
• YouTube subtitles: Achi' language activist creates videos teaching Achi' vocabulary. She uses Speechyou to auto-generate subtitles, then exports SRT files for her videos.
• Accessibility: A municipal town hall meeting in Cubulco provides live captioning in Achi' using Speechyou, ensuring participation by deaf community members.

How Speechyou Helps

Speechyou offers a complete solution for Achi' speech to text, transcription, and subtitles. It supports the Latin script with correct diacritics, outputs timestamps, and exports to SRT, VTT, and plain text. The Solo plan includes unlimited transcription, making it affordable for individuals and small organizations. With real-time processing and high accuracy, Speechyou empowers Achi' speakers to digitize their language and share it with the world.