Pupils at Setberg School contributed their voices
Pupils at Setbergsskóli, like pupils at 1,360 other schools, took part in the Samróm Primary School Reading Competition and emerged victorious in their category for the number of sentences read in Samróm between 18 and 25 January. Data from the Samróm word bank shows that during the competition, around 790,000 sentences were read by 6,172 people.
Students lent their voices to the cause
Pupils at Setberg School took part in the Samróm Primary School Reading Competition, and emerged victorious in their category for the most sentences read in Samróm between 18th and 25th January. Data from the Samróm word bank shows that during the competition, around 790,000 sentences were read by 6,172 people.
Congratulations, Setbergsskóli!
Awards and recognition for outstanding performance were presented at a ceremony at Bessastaðir yesterday, where the President and First Lady, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson and Eliza Reed, warmly welcomed representatives from the winning schools. It was Heiðrún Ingólfsdóttir and Þorsteinn Darri Ingólfsson who proudly accepted the Sphero Spark robots on behalf of their school; the robots combine play with programming lessons and are designed to encourage curiosity, creativity and new discoveries.
The purpose and objectives of Samróm and the Primary Schools' Reading Competition
The primary school reading competition is held to encourage participation in The Samrómur project which is about collecting recordings of reading that will be used to teach computers and devices to understand Icelandic. Everyone can take part and read for their school, and therefore parents and staff are just as encouraged to record readings for the schools. Almannarómur, Deloitte and the University of Reykjavík developed the website Samróm, where the Icelandic public can easily contribute to the language's development. The project is part of the Language Technology Programme of Iceland, which is supported by the Ministry of Education, with the aim of increasing access to Icelandic in all kinds of technology. For computers and devices to understand Icelandic well, a large number of recordings of Icelandic speech from all sorts of people are needed, and in this way, everyone can contribute „their voice“.
Your voice matters – get involved
Why Samrómur?
In recent years, there has been a revolution in voice technology and the way we use our voice to control technology. Icelandic is at a disadvantage due to these rapid technological changes, but many of us already interact with computers and various devices in a foreign language. People will increasingly use their voice to control all kinds of devices, but the problem is that the devices do not understand Icelandic. Therefore, it is important not to miss the boat, and work has now begun on a major collaborative project to make Icelandic viable for computers and devices. They will be joined by Icelandic universities, institutions, companies and organisations, which over the coming years will develop the necessary infrastructure for software that understands and speaks Icelandic. Samrómur will be part of this project, an open dataset of voice samples for Icelandic that anyone can use to develop their own language technology solutions. In this way, we are ensuring the security of Icelandic in the digital age.