Tepehua Speech to Text: Preserving an Endangered Language with AI

Tepehua (Tachiwix) is a Totonacan language spoken by approximately 10,000 people in the Mexican states of Veracruz, Hidalgo, and Puebla. It is an endangered language, with only a small number of fluent speakers, most of whom are elderly. The language has three main dialects—Pisaflores, Huehuetla, and Tlachichilco—each with distinct phonetic and lexical features. In recent years, there has been a growing movement to revitalize Tepehua through documentation, education, and media production. Accurate speech-to-text technology is a critical tool in this effort.

Why Accurate Speech-to-Text Matters for Tepehua

For many endangered languages, the first step toward preservation is creating a written corpus. Traditional manual transcription is time-consuming and expensive, especially for a language with limited resources. Speechyou's Tepehua speech-to-text feature allows users to transcribe audio and video content quickly and accurately. This enables:

• Oral history preservation: Elders can share stories without worrying about the burden of transcription.
• Language documentation: Linguists can build large annotated datasets for research.
• Subtitle generation: Videos in Tepehua can be subtitled in SRT or VTT format, making them accessible to a wider audience.
• Educational materials: Schools can create bilingual texts that support language learning.

Transcription Challenges Specific to Tepehua

Tepehua presents several challenges for automatic speech recognition. The language has a complex consonant inventory that includes ejective stops (p', t', k', ts', ch') and glottalized sounds. These are rare in most world languages and can be easily confused with plain stops by generic ASR models. Additionally, the three dialects differ in vowel quality and intonation, so a model trained on only one dialect will perform poorly on others.

Another challenge is the lack of standardized orthography. While the Latin script is used, some speakers substitute Spanish spelling conventions, leading to inconsistent representations of the same word. Speechyou's model is trained on a diverse corpus that includes all three dialects and multiple writing styles, enabling it to produce consistent, accurate transcriptions.

Use Cases for Tepehua Transcription

• Community radio: Stations in Tepehua regions can subtitle their broadcasts for deaf viewers.
• Cultural videos: Documentaries, folk tales, and religious ceremonies can be subtitled in Tepehua and Spanish.
• Language revitalization: Teachers can use transcribed stories as reading material in classrooms.
• Linguistic research: Fieldworkers can transcribe interviews and narratives in minutes instead of hours.

How Speechyou Helps

Speechyou is the only cloud-based speech-to-text platform that supports Tepehua. Our model has been developed using transfer learning from related Totonacan languages and fine-tuned on a small but high-quality Tepehua corpus. The service is available in the Solo plan, which offers unlimited transcription at no extra cost per minute. We support all common audio formats and can generate SRT and VTT subtitles for video platforms.

By using Speechyou, Tepehua speakers and advocates can preserve their language for future generations with minimal effort. Whether you are transcribing a single oral history recording or producing a series of educational videos, our tool provides the accuracy and speed you need.