Artificial Intelligence Speaks Spanish

Promotion of the Spanish language worldwide is the most powerful tool that companies and governments in the Spanish-speaking community have to take advantage of the cultural and business possibilities of artificial intelligence.

New advances in the use of natural language — in this case Spanish — to communicate with machines will make data transfer between machines and humans a simpler and more efficient task.

Although artificial intelligence, like human intelligence, is a very difficult concept to explain, the European Commission defines it as software (and possibly also hardware) systems designed by humans which, given a complex goal, act in the physical or digital dimension.

We could say that AI gives answers based on the data obtained from its activity. In other words, it performs tasks that up to now required human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, and perception.

The term AI was first used by John McCarthy at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, although a decade earlier the mathematicians Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann had worked on the systems and computing theories that paved the way for its development.

A question which Alan Turing answered in 1950 by posing his famous test, which states that a computer 'thinks' when its answers are indistinguishable from those that a human being would give.

Always based on imagination, the science fiction genre has posed questions and scenarios that have challenged and stimulated the creativity of scientists.

In 'I, Robot' (1950), Isaac Asimov considers the three laws of robotics, which prohibit robots from harming humans even at the cost of their own survival.

If we consider language as the most common and versatile way to access and convey information, there's no doubt that the development of Language Technology (LT) is one of the AI research fields with the highest growth prospects.

A language model is an artificial intelligence system formed by a series of deep neural networks trained to acquire an understanding of the language and write at an expert level.

To achieve this, the system needs to be fed with huge amounts of data (corpus), which in the case of Spanish can come from institutions such as the National Library of Spain, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, the EFE Agency, the Cervantes Institute, or RTVE.

The importance of Language Technology as a vehicle for verbally interacting with machines shouldn't hide the role that Spanish plays in a technology currently dominated, almost exclusively, by the English language and with an ever-growing influence of Chinese.

The disruptive and transformative nature of AI makes it necessary to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the potential of the Spanish language and multiply the initiatives that favor its presence in the worlds of academia, science, and business.

Making sure that the verbal inputs and outputs of the machine are in correct Spanish is the main challenge for companies and official bodies. Governments and institutions such as the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language or the Cervantes Institute have made proposals to address this.

Funded by the European Union, this strategic project (PERTE in Spanish) revolves around five cornerstones: creation of a knowledge base in Spanish and co-official languages, artificial intelligence, science, the learning of Spanish, and Spanish in the world and cultural industries.

Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence (LEIA in Spanish) is an initiative promoted by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language with the support of companies such as Telefónica or Google. Its objective is to guarantee the use of correct Spanish in technological media by promoting the development of tools and apps.

MarIA is a project developed by the National Supercomputing Center based on 135,733,450,668 words from millions of web pages collected by the National Library of Spain and occupying a total of 570 gigabytes of information.

One of the most popular uses of the natural language application in AI are chatbots, which allow a human being to chat with a machine. LuzIA is a good example: developed entirely in Spain and in Spanish, it works on the WhatsApp application.