BaNaVA: A cross-platform AI mobile application for preserving the Bahnaric languages

Tho Quan Thanh, Giang Dinh Lu, Duc Nguyen Quang, Hai Vu Hoang, Quy Nguyen Tran, Khoa Tran Ngoc Dang, Minh Tran Duy

Abstract: AI-powered translation is a promising solution to the language barrier faced by the Bahnar people. However, developing low-resource text-to-speech translation systems is challenging. The authors propose a mobile application called BaNaVA to address these challenges. BaNaVA uses a combination of natural machine translation and linguistic analysis to translate between Vietnamese and Bahnaric with high accuracy, while also using a voice conversion system to convert the voice quality to match that of a genuine Bahnar individual. They incur as two connected and important services residing inside the logical framework of the application. BaNaVA is designed using micro-services and React Native software framework, which allows the application to be developed cross-platform. This mobile application utilizes specific neural machine translation (NMT) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies to efficiently operate within the edge computing environment of popular mobile devices.