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Apply for community grant: Personal project (gpu)
We are a small team of enthusiasts who, in our free time, are building an open-source project for Belarusian text-to-speech. Our main project is the Bextts Space: https://huggingface.co/spaces/archivartaunik/Bextts
— a model based on XTTS v2 (https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2
). We collect and publish open Belarusian speech datasets on our Hugging Face profile: https://huggingface.co/archivartaunik
, train and improve the models, and make the results freely available to everyone.
Currently, inference runs on zeroGPU, but this is clearly not enough: sessions often break, there are strict limits on time and load, which prevents us from reliably demonstrating the model or integrating it into external services. Even a minimal dedicated GPU server with a small amount of memory would give us stable inference and allow us to keep our Space (https://huggingface.co/spaces/archivartaunik/Bextts
) reliably online.
The goal of the project is to make Belarusian TTS widely accessible: from voice assistants and audio dubbing of educational and cultural materials to creating a universal voice library for Belarusian-language apps, games, podcasts, radio, and more. Everything we build is intended to remain open-source and available for the community without restrictions.
Belarusian is officially considered a low-resource language and one that is at risk of disappearing. UNESCO has included Belarusian in the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger and given it the status “vulnerable” — which means it is already formally recognized as a language that may disappear in the future. 🔗 https://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages
In addition, UN human rights special rapporteurs and bodies record systemic discrimination against Belarusian in education, the media, and the public sphere, and explicitly state that this situation threatens the language’s survival (A/HRC/44/55 — report of the UN Special Rapporteur). 🔗 https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G20/108/76/PDF/G2010876.pdf
Against this background, it is especially important to have modern digital tools specifically for Belarusian. Your server would help us create and maintain an open TTS infrastructure that will work for the preservation and development of the Belarusian language.