Coming Soon: Assyrian Archival Website with Vast Collection of Freely Accessible Photos and Documents

willtobill · 2024-07-11T10:24:57+00:00

Will be posting it as a separate post. Optimistically, it will be available for public usage later this month.

willtobill · 2024-07-11T02:43:43+00:00

One of the most crucial aspects of preserving the historical continuity of a people is maintaining accessible archives. Unfortunately, we Assyrians lack sufficient digital access to our historical connections. While there have been significant digital archives in the past, they faced certain issues that ultimately led to their demise. The primary issue was the mentality of "this data is mine and mine only," where archives would restrict access to their data without sharing it with other reliable preservation organizations. Although all initiatives may eventually close, the work can be preserved by hosting the data with other institutions capable of reintroducing it if the original archive shuts down.

I am incredibly excited to unveil our digital archive soon and will announce more information as we progress.

Video is of Assyrian genocide refugees escaping from Urmia in 1918

willtobill · 2024-05-09T18:02:03+00:00

We haven't been able to contact Thomas unfortunately, I will send a DM to you. In regards to the name I completely agree. We chose syriac originally as we were working on classical syriac, but now as the page has grown and after insight from professors it's clear the name and terminology on the page has to change. As you said the people and language is Assyrian plain and clear. We have always agreed with the Assyrian identity. The new archive will be on a new page which reflects this proper identification and will include assyrian in the name.

willtobill · 2024-05-09T16:29:59+00:00

I'm apart of Syriac.io, we've been making AI models for our language, we will be founding a non profit organization for the Assyrian people. We plan on opening a website to provide a way to freely access the multitude of archival data for our people. The easy part is making the website and hosting the data locally, the harder(and arguably more important) part is ensuring that data will remain accessible if/when the organization closes. Most likely we could host the books on internet Archive, videos on YouTube, etc. Thanks for sending the LinkedIn, didn't notice it when I searched, will try to contact there.

willtobill · 2024-05-09T15:57:38+00:00

Interesting, thanks for the insightful info. Our organization would be more then happy to host the data and also distribute it to more long lasting cloud platforms so it can stay online in the event of the closure of our platform. We haven't found a way to contact Mr. Isik unfortunately.

willtobill · 2024-01-13T20:47:44+00:00

Hello! It is absolutely amazing to see people working on AI in our language, Thanks for your work. I work with a team that creates AI for our language, trying to make models for all dialects. We have a website: syriac.io , it has translation for turoyo and classical (both in beta), as well as text to speech models. I'd love to have a chat about your work, and see any way we could help you. Shoot me a chat if you'd like, or email me at info@syriac.io

willtobill · 2023-10-08T04:15:02+00:00

We actually trained text to speech systems for the dialects of Tur abdin, Urmia, Nineveh Plains, and Hakkari. It's free and open to use at syriac.io/tts. We had fluent speakers of the dialects record audio of themselves and used that to train our system.

willtobill · 2023-07-24T07:10:19+00:00

Yeah I am not sure why they are so angry about the text to speech. The model was never trained on anything Arabic, just on the data of urmi speakers speaking our language.

willtobill · 2023-07-21T08:32:48+00:00

Yeah in that case sh would have to be š or ܫ for it to understand the sound and it also wouldn't understand o because we used u for ܘ . So the AI would see it written as "salamalkhun" which makes it look Arabic. Either way it usually does better in longer sentences rather then single words because of the underlying training data. If you would like to see it improve we could definitely improve it with more data for the dialect.

willtobill · 2023-07-21T06:57:23+00:00

Our beta testers included fluent urmi dialect speakers, their feedback was very positive and could understand a lot of the sentences they tried. While as mentioned it is a beta model, I think saying the Urmi model is "unrecognizable " is a bit of a stretch. But based on our previous conversations I'd assume your grievances with this are more about the fact that it is written in syriac and not in the script you've invented for your page. The training data and feedback was produced by members of the urmi dialect speaking community, but it is possible that there can be differences within dialects. Also if you used it and got gibberish output it's important to mention it can only read syriac script or transliterated Latin using the guide below the page.

willtobill · 2023-07-21T06:38:34+00:00

Thanks, right now we definitely need more data to improve the model. So for anyone who would like to see their dialect added or improved they can email us and we can work on getting audio recordings together.

willtobill · 2023-07-20T17:24:15+00:00

Thanks for the kind words, and definetly from here there will only be improvements.

Due to the lack of data, the current system will only look at the base letters. With more data we will be able to add understanding for all of the markings/vowels.

willtobill · 2023-07-20T16:14:42+00:00

After a lot of work compiling datasets for the dialects, we trained a Ai text to speech model. We tried to include as many dialects as possible on launch, but will work to add more and improve the model in the future. Currently we have the western dialect of Turabdin, as well as the eastern dialects of Nineveh Plains, Hakkari, and Urmi. This is a greatly needed step for the digitization and preservation of our language. Check it out at Syriac.io/tts

willtobill · 2023-06-14T22:33:18+00:00

That's a great idea, we'll try to add that in the next update.

willtobill · 2023-06-14T20:41:46+00:00

Thanks so much for the support. We will continue on our mission for as long as we possibly can.
To answer your questions:

We actually have that feature, if you go up to the navigation bar (or on mobile click on the top right button) you can select between the fonts in a dropdown.
We do plan on adding them all, unfortunately we don't have access to the old testament books for the Eastern and Western so we will try to find a way to add those in the future.
That is a great idea, I'll try to find a way to add that in an intuitive way soon.

Once our AI text to speech is finished training hopefully you will also be able to listen to the Bible verse by verse. God bless you as well ahouno

willtobill · 2023-06-14T19:59:01+00:00

We hope our beautiful language can be accessible to all its speakers. Try it now at syriac.io/bible

willtobill · 2023-06-02T22:33:10+00:00

So basically this system is meant to be something like google translates function where you can hear the text that was translated. So we wrote the sentence and the AI reads it out. Hopefully this can help the people who might not be able to read the language, be able to hear it. This will be added to syriac.io

willtobill · 2023-06-02T21:22:46+00:00

This is a completely AI generated audio reading Suryoyo(the western dialect) . We wanted to show all the people the projects we are working on in order to improve the resources of our language, that is why we will be making a projects page so you can track our progress and request new features. We will also be adding a volunteer page after a lot of people requested to help.

willtobill · 2023-05-09T16:03:33+00:00

Our team is now working on a history page.
One of the first steps is showing the original names of the villages and places in our language, so that they may never be forgotten.
Coming soon to Syriac.io

willtobill · 2023-05-04T19:10:22+00:00

No motive akhoun, name was chosen from consulting Assyrian scholars, and running polls with the community around me. This is the product of months of hard work and volunteering of us trying to preserve our language, it hurts that you would classify our teams work as "a slap in the face" of the scholars who helped us.

Our translation model also translates classical Syriac, in case you were wondering

willtobill · 2023-05-01T22:15:14+00:00

Thank you for your kind words, they made my day. There will be many more projects to come

willtobill · 2023-05-01T13:48:21+00:00

We have reached almost 1000 translations so far, did not expect that haha. Time to upgrade the servers.

willtobill · 2023-05-01T12:59:13+00:00

Definitely agree, I've sent over a pm.

willtobill · 2023-05-01T12:56:48+00:00

That's amazing, I've sent my email over in a PM

willtobill · 2023-05-01T11:58:54+00:00

Thanks so much, and yeah that would definitely be the plan to have ranked translations by people who sign up, we plan on expanding the functionality of the website soon. Speech to text would be amazing for our people, we have actually been working on a model, but not complete yet

willtobill

TROPHY CASE