Alangan Speech-to-Text: Preserving a Language Through AI

The Alangan language, spoken by the Alangan Mangyan people of Mindoro, Philippines, is a vital part of the cultural heritage of the region. With only a few thousand speakers, it is considered endangered, but modern technology offers new hope for preservation. Accurate speech-to-text tools can transcribe oral histories, songs, and conversations, creating digital archives that are searchable and shareable. Speechyou provides an AI-powered solution for Alangan transcription, enabling users to convert spoken language into text with ease.

Where Alangan Is Spoken

Alangan is primarily spoken in the mountainous interior of Oriental Mindoro, particularly in the municipalities of Naujan, Baco, and San Teodoro. The Alangan people are one of the eight Mangyan groups, each with its own language. Alangan is closely related to other Mangyan languages like Iraya and Tadyawan, but distinct in its phonology and vocabulary. The language is oral, with a growing body of written texts using the Latin script.

Why Accurate Speech-to-Text Matters

For a language like Alangan, documentation is critical. Elders who hold traditional knowledge are aging, and younger generations increasingly use Tagalog or English. By transcribing spoken Alangan, communities can create reading materials, subtitled videos, and language-learning resources. Researchers studying Philippine linguistics need accurate transcripts for analysis. And the Alangan themselves can use text to communicate in their mother tongue in written form, strengthening identity.

Specific Transcription Challenges

Alangan poses several challenges for automatic speech recognition:

• Phonemic complexity: The language has glottal stops, prenasalized stops (e.g., /mb/, /nd/), and vowel length distinctions. These sounds are rare in most ASR training data.
• Code-switching: Speakers often mix Tagalog or English words, requiring the model to handle multiple languages within a single utterance.
• Dialectal variation: Differences between Northern, Southern, and Central Alangan affect word pronunciations and vocabulary.
• Limited data: Few hours of transcribed Alangan audio exist publicly, making it hard to train models from scratch.

Speechyou overcomes these by using a custom model fine-tuned on similar Philippine languages and then adapted to Alangan with user-provided samples. The result is a system that recognizes glottal stops accurately and handles code-switching gracefully.

Use Cases

• Oral history preservation: Transcribe recorded interviews with Alangan elders documenting traditional customs, medicinal plants, and folklore.
• Subtitle generation: Add Alangan subtitles to videos of community events, making them accessible to the Mangyan diaspora.
• Educational content: Create text versions of spoken stories for use in classrooms to teach children to read and write Alangan.
• Research: Provide linguists with clean transcripts for analyzing sentence structure and discourse patterns.
• Accessibility: Help Alangan speakers with hearing impairments follow audio content via real-time captioning.
• Publishing: Compile anthologies of Alangan oral literature, with transcriptions alongside translations.

How Speechyou Helps

Speechyou is designed for low-resource languages. Users simply upload an audio file (MP3, WAV, etc.) or a video, select "Alangan" from the language list, and start transcription. The output is editable, and timestamps are generated automatically. You can export the result as plain text, SRT, or VTT subtitle files. The Solo plan offers unlimited transcription minutes, making it affordable for community projects.

Conclusion

Alangan is a treasure of the Philippines, but it risks fading if not documented. Speechyou provides a practical, affordable tool for transcribing and subtitling in Alangan. By using AI designed for minority languages, we help ensure that the voices of the Alangan people continue to be heard, recorded, and studied for generations to come.