A Connected Planet

Due to personnel changes at carnegie mellon university (cmu), acp concluded its partnership with the cmu language technology institute (lti) and is in the process of establishing a new collaboration with the university of edinburgh to advance the development of an open-source text-to-speech (tts) capability for under-resourced languages. As part of this initiative, acp focused on defining over 2,000 utterances that encompass basic creole vocabulary and language relevant to primary- grade education. These utterances were derived from diverse sources, including news articles, books, journals, the bible, and pre-existing datasets. To record the utterances, acp engaged a professional recording studio in haiti. The recordings were completed in two sessions, featuring both male and female voice actors to provide diverse voice options. The studio handled editing, cutting, and exporting the recordings, with acp conducting thorough reviews to ensure quality. To refine the initial tts development, acp organized a second recording session aimed at enhancing voice clarity and addressing the specific tonal needs of questions, which require a distinct intonation at the end of sentences. Using these recordings, the university of edinburgh leveraged its proprietary everyvoice tts toolkit to create two synthesized voices for haitian creole. The everyvoice tts toolkit is one of the products emerging from the speech generation for indigenous language education (sgile) project within the university of edinburgh, whose aim is to research and develop state-of-the-art speech synthesis systems and techniques for indigenous languages, with a focus on how to integrate text-to-speech technology into the classroom. Acp is now actively seeking grant funding to develop a tts engine that will serve as a platform for deploying these synthetic voices. Concurrently, acp is working on building an informative website that includes online text- to-speech tools and implementing a comprehensive marketing and communication strategy. The ultimate goal is to distribute the mobile application globally via the google play store.

Acp continued providing policy and planning support to the department of defense, united states central command (uscentcom) in the areas of information sharing and dissemination through the use of cloud-based platforms. Acp provides an unclassified information sharing (uis) liaison officer to various national level agencies in the washington dc national capital region and advisors at uscentcom headquarters in tampa, fl. The primary focus of their work this year focused on planning and prototyping of new cloud-based information sharing systems to enable compliance with new federal laws on information sharing.