Skopje, 27 December 2024 (MIA) – The creators of the new AI-based digital platform Bookie for transcribing Macedonian speech, which enhances the use of the official language when crating texts in digital form, have launched version 2.0, which is faster, more accurate and support transcription from audio files.

As stated by Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Dejan Porjazovski, an expert involved in creating the tool and currently researching at Finland's Aalto University, highlighted that having a transcript offers many advantages, including the ability to search the content more efficiently.

“Television networks have an enormous amount of archived audio material that has not been transcribed. With the help of Bookie models, that material can be transcribed. Regarding education, if online lectures are transcribed, it would help students more easily to find the content they need,” Porjazovski said.

According to University’s Rector Biljana Angelova, the implementation and use of the Macedonian language in the digital world are crucial for its preservation and promotion.

“The launch of Bookie is of great importance to our society and will facilitate work in many fields,” Angelova said.

Professor Nikola Stikov, from the Technical University of Montreal, Canada, who initiated the creation of Bookie explained that his aim was to preserve the Macedonian language and heritage, stressing that thousands of hours of recorded content are decaying in the humid corners of Macedonian institutions, waiting to be searched and indexed, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje said in a press release.

The new app is accessible via the link https://huggingface.co/spaces/Macedonian-ASR/Bookie-w2v2-Macedonian-ASR

Photo: Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje