Cornish speech to text

Cornish Speech to Text: Preserving and Reviving Kernewek with AI Transcription

Cornish (Kernewek) is a living Celtic language that has experienced a remarkable revival. Once spoken across Cornwall, it survived in written form and was revived in the 20th century. Today, the language is taught in schools, used in media, and spoken by a growing community. Accurate speech-to-text technology for Cornish is essential for transcribing interviews, podcasts, and educational content, helping to preserve the language for future generations.

Why Accurate Cornish Transcription Matters

For a minority language like Cornish, every piece of transcribed audio is a resource for learners and researchers. Podcasts in Cornish, such as "An Kescows" or "Kernewek Nowodhow," can be transcribed to make them accessible to learners who struggle with listening comprehension. Subtitle generation for Cornish films and videos allows the content to reach a wider audience, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Accurate transcription also supports the documentation of spoken Cornish, capturing dialects and variations that might otherwise be lost.

Challenges in Cornish Speech Recognition

Developing ASR for Cornish is not without difficulties:

• Spelling and pronunciation: Check word forms and mutations against the recording and the spelling convention used for the project.
• Mutation system: The initial consonant of a word changes based on grammatical context (e.g., "kath" (cat) becomes "gath" after certain particles). The ASR must recognize these changes.
• Limited data: There are few publicly available transcribed audio corpora for Cornish, making it hard to train models from scratch.
• Dialectal variation: The three main revived forms (Middle, Late, Unified) have different pronunciations and spellings.

Regional Cornish pronunciation and vocabulary need review in their own context. When working with Revived Middle Cornish (Kernewek Kres), Late Cornish (Kernewek Diwedhes), Unified Cornish (Kernewek Unys), keep the speaker’s wording and check unfamiliar forms with a fluent reviewer. Use your chosen Cornish spelling convention consistently rather than mixing forms from different sources. Check local names against the speaker’s intended form and keep a glossary for recurring names.

Use Cases for Cornish Speech-to-Text

• Podcast and radio transcription: Automatically transcribe weekly Cornish podcasts and radio shows for archives and learner materials.

• Film and video subtitling: Add Cornish subtitles to movies, documentaries, and YouTube videos, supporting the language's presence in digital media.

• Language learning: Students can record themselves speaking Cornish and get transcripts to check pronunciation and grammar.

• Work from a saved Cornish audio or video recording in the online app. Review the resulting transcript and export SRT or VTT captions for your video; this describes a recorded-file workflow.

• Social media content: Create accessible Cornish videos with subtitles for platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

How Speechyou Helps

Our platform is easy to use: upload your audio or video file, select Cornish as the language, and receive a transcript after processing. You can edit the transcript directly in the browser and export it as SRT, VTT, or plain text. Whether you are a Cornish speaker, a learner, or a researcher, Speechyou provides the tools you need to transcribe and subtitle Cornish content efficiently.

Get Started Today

Ready to transcribe your Cornish audio? Sign up for Speechyou's Solo plan, which includes unlimited transcription for Cornish and 100+ other languages. Try Speechyou free for 3 days. Join the revival of Kernewek with modern AI technology.