We evaluate the impact of recent improvements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) on transcribing Estonian children’s speech. Our research focuses on fine-tuning large ASR models with a 10-hour Estonian children’s speech dataset to create accurate transcriptions. Our results show that large pre-trained models hold great potential when fine-tuned first with a more substantial Estonian adult speech corpus and then further trained with children’s speech.

We present the MTee project - a research initiative funded via an Estonian public procurement to develop machine translation technology that is open-source and free of charge. The MTee project delivered an open-source platform serving state-of-the-art machine translation systems supporting four domains for six language pairs translating from Estonian into English, German, and Russian and vice-versa. The platform also features grammatical error correction and speech translation for Estonian and allows for formatted document translation and automatic domain detection. The software, data and training workflows for machine translation engines are all made publicly available for further use and research.