Khanty Speech to Text: Preserving a Uralic Language with AI

Khanty (also known as Ostyak) is a Uralic language spoken by around 10,000 people in western Siberia, primarily in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. It is a sister language to Mansi and a distant relative of Hungarian. The language is written in Cyrillic, with additional letters like ӆ, ӈ, and Ӓ. Despite its small number of speakers, Khanty has a vibrant oral tradition and is an important part of the indigenous culture of the region.

Accurate speech-to-text for Khanty is crucial for several reasons. First, it helps document and preserve the language at a time when young speakers are shifting to Russian. Second, it makes Khanty media accessible — subtitled videos can reach diaspora communities and language learners worldwide. Third, it supports linguistic research, allowing scholars to quickly transcribe recordings and analyze grammatical patterns.

Challenges in Transcribing Khanty Audio

Khanty presents several hurdles for automatic speech recognition:

• Dialect variation: Northern, Eastern, and Western dialects differ significantly in pronunciation and vocabulary. Our model has been trained on multiple dialects, but we recommend selecting the appropriate dialect in the settings for best results.
• Vowel harmony: Like many Uralic languages, Khanty has vowel harmony. The model must correctly identify front and back vowels to produce accurate transcriptions.
• Palatalization: The distinction between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants is phonemic. For example, 'т' (t) vs 'т’' (tʲ) changes meaning. Speechyou's acoustic model is fine-tuned to capture these differences.
• Limited digital data: Compared to major languages, Khanty has very few transcribed audio corpora. We have assembled a custom dataset from public archives and field recordings to train our model.

Use Cases for Khanty Speech-to-Text

Podcast and video subtitles: Khanty-language content creators can now automatically generate subtitles in Khanty Cyrillic. This makes their videos accessible to a wider audience, including those who are hard of hearing or prefer reading along.

Oral history preservation: Museums and cultural centers often have recordings of elders telling stories in Khanty. With Speechyou, these recordings can be transcribed and archived, ensuring that the knowledge is not lost.

Language education: Schools in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug can use the tool to transcribe Khanty lessons, create bilingual textbooks, and develop interactive learning materials.

Research and documentation: Linguists studying Khanty can quickly transcribe hours of fieldwork recordings, saving weeks of manual effort. The exported text can be further annotated for grammatical analysis.

Accessibility: For Khanty speakers with hearing impairments, speech-to-text provides real-time captions for community meetings, religious services, and public announcements.

How Speechyou Helps

Speechyou is one of the few AI transcription tools that supports Khanty. Unlike generic models that produce garbled text, our system is specifically trained on Khanty audio. It handles the Cyrillic script, multiple dialects, and complex agglutinative morphology. The output can be exported in SRT or VTT format, ready for use in video editing software. Plus, with the Solo plan, you get unlimited transcription for Khanty and 100+ other languages — no per-minute charges.

To get started, simply upload your audio or video file, select 'Khanty (Cyrillic)' as the language, and click transcribe. In minutes, you'll have a clean text file or subtitles. Try it today and help keep the Khanty language alive in the digital age.