Gobbled Gaelic

Dundee University is searching for a postgraduate native Gaelic speaker to salvage its project to develop a Gaelic-speaking computer.

Dundee's MicroCentre, world famous for its communication systems for non-speaking people, has a prototype computer which can convert Gaelic text into speech, but synthetic speech expert Iain Murray admits it is not very accurate and has an English accent. A native speaker's voice is needed as the basis of the computer-generated speech.

"The prototype was built by a Gaelic-speaking student from Lismore, and it was hoped that she would continue to develop the system, but she moved to France to marry a German chemist," Dr Murray said.