Bartley hopes the technology can support and improve current projects such as Culture Vannin’s initiative – an organisation that promotes local culture – to ask a native speaker to transcribe old recordings every year.
“That can take hours and hours, and I think it is a situation where technology could increase the productivity of that person, and then that person can do something else like teaching the language or creating a course.
“There is lots of potential there – not to replace people, but be an addition to the creativity of the community,” Bartley said.
“There’s a massive community behind Manx that are really driven to the revival of the language and to create resources.”
The technology’s pronunciation of Manx Gaelic is informed by the data that Bartley feeds it.
He said: “When considering what data to give it, I need to make sure it is good Manx.”
The tool was also “really important because if you have a visually impaired person, as it stands, unless they participate in a completely spoken session, Manx is pretty much inaccessible to them,” he said.
“So text-to-speech technology extends the availability of Manx to them,” he continued.
Bartley, who has been learning Manx since 2023, said that he had made Culture Vannin aware of the tool, and he said he hopes to make it available to access online.