Case Study: Vake boosts Finnish speech recognition and AI development with Solita’s Donate Speech service

Vake boosts Finnish speech recognition with Solita, collecting 4,000+ hours of speech

The Finnish State Development Company Vake (currently the Climate Fund) faced the challenge of developing Finnish speech recognition and AI without relying solely on major commercial tech giants. They needed to collect a large and diverse bank of Finnish speech samples to enable the creation of socially significant services. Vake contacted the vendor, Solita, for assistance in this endeavor.

Solita designed and implemented the Donate Speech service, a secure and accessible web and mobile platform that made it easy and engaging for people to donate speech samples. The solution successfully collected over 4,000 hours of speech from more than 214,000 individual donations, capturing a wide range of dialects, ages, and backgrounds. This databank, stored at the University of Helsinki, now provides a crucial resource for researchers and businesses to develop improved Finnish-language AI services for sectors like healthcare and education.