Under initiative of “BMG UpSkill” LLP (the daughter company of Bilim Land) the meeting was organized in ISSAI to discuss potential usage of Kazakh TTS model in BMG UpSkill Coursera projects.
BMG UpSkill is the official partner of Coursera in Kazakhstan and BMG UpSkill is responsible to localize Coursera services in Kazakhstan and to create user support center. Under support of «Қазақстан халқына» Foundation and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, as part of the pilot project, more than 600 courses will be localized into the Kazakh language and around 20 000 students from 25 regional universities will be given the opportunity to take these courses.
Currently, BMG UpSkill prepared a COURSERA-QAZAQSTAN online platform and started the work on translating courses with the technical and methodological support from Coursera. So far, 50 courses in Kazakh and Russian have been fully translated and uploaded to the platform and process for posting the next 50 translated courses on the platform are underway.
The Director of BMG UpSkill Mrs. Assel Mukhametzhanova together with her colleagues Mrs. Alima Ibrasheva (academic director) and Mrs. Anar Qurmanzhan (project manager) discussed with our team potential usage of ISSAI’s Kazakh TTS model for their Coursera project and if possible to upgrade the model to meet BMG UpSkill needs for Kazakh texts automatical narration.
ISSAI team provided a comprehensive explanation on the tool which BMG UpSkill may use and its functionalities and capabilities. ISSAI, in its NLP Roadmap for Kazakh language, has some plans for near future to create similar tool and ready to assist BMG UpSkill in implementation this tool into their platform. Parties will meet again to discuss in more details the technical, administrative and organizational details of this potential collaboration.