LINGUA: Expanding Europe’s Voices in AI

LINGUA: An Open Call from Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab

On this European Day of Languages celebrating Europe’s rich linguistic and cultural diversity, we are excited to encourage lifelong language learning and greater intercultural understanding by releasing the LINGUA Open Call. This call invites proposals that advance digital inclusion for Europe’s low-resource languages. These are languages with limited online content and datasets, leading to underrepresentation in AI technologies compared to high-resource counterparts such as English, Spanish, French, or German. While many vulnerable and endangered languages fall into this category, the call is open to any European language that lacks the digital foundations required for fair representation and participation in the AI era.

LINGUA aims to address this gap by supporting innovative projects that collect high-quality speech and text datasets for Europe’s underrepresented languages. It is part of Microsoft’s commitment to digital sovereignty and linguistic diversity in Europe, ensuring that every language has the opportunity to be represented in the future of AI. Read more about the initiative (opens in new tab).

Eligibility

We encourage proposals from Nonprofits, NGOs, universities, research institutions, social enterprises, cultural organizations, and startups are open to proposals with multiple collaborators that are committed to public good, demonstrating community engagement, ethical data practices.

To be eligible for the LINGUA Open Call, applicants must be:

Committed to producing fully open licensed datasets for text-to-text, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech applications, laying the groundwork for low-resource languages to be included in open language and speech models.