I was just at a networking/research technology conference in Helsinki (TNC26) where the topic of nordic languages— especially minority ones—being under-represented by current automated transcription/translation tools came up in one of the side talks I attended. There’s some effort by various European NRENs and universities to train models on these languages so those tools can be more widely available to students, academics, and the public. The talk was about “Scribe” by SUNET (Swedish Research Network) hosting whisper models for this purpose.

That should be especially good for things like the multiple sapmi languages! At least in finnish you can already write in the proper “book language” and get pretty accurate translations, even though the dialects still escape that.

Also, Finnish is fucking hard lol. I can usually pick up a bit of language wherever I travel, basic phrases usually. But DAMN trying to nail the epiglottal sounds of even “Hyvää yötä” threw me!

It is usually especially hard to learn for indo-european speakers, so it is not just you struggling! Haha :)