ASTANA – The Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) at Nazarbayev University presented Soyle App, a multifunctional application for speech recognition, voice synthesis, text and speech translation into four languages, in Astana on Nov. 20.
Ulzhan Bissarinova, product manager at ISSAI, during the presentation of Soyle. Photo credit: Aibarshyn Akhmetkali/The Astana Times
Powered by Kazakhstan’s foundational speech model, Soyle App is an AI product developed to enhance multilingual communication for Kazakh audiences and beyond. The speech app supports four languages: Kazakh, Russian, English and Turkish, with plans to expand to 10 languages by 2025.
The name Soyle means “speak” in Kazakh, reflecting the application’s mission to eliminate language barriers through user-friendly, intuitive multilingual support.
Ulzhan Bissarinova, product manager at ISSAI, highlighted the institute’s commitment to advancing AI solutions for Kazakhstan’s unique needs.
“We want to use artificial intelligence for good purposes, so the institute sets a lot of tasks for itself, one of which is to solve regional problems. At the same time, we aimed to reduce the gap between traditional and digital communication, to provide data protection and to provide ourselves financially,” said Bissarinova during the presentation.
“I would like to emphasize data protection because the Soyle App runs on the servers of Nazarbayev University, that is, on the territory of Kazakhstan. The users’ data is not transferred to any foreign countries, it is not used to create any machine models, so we contribute to the protection of user data,” she added.
Bissarinova also said that compared to other translation tools like Google Translate, Yandex Translate, and GPT-4, Soyle delivers superior translation quality, as evidenced by its BLEU (bilingual evaluation understudy – an algorithm for evaluating the quality of machine-translated text) scores on the FLoRes benchmark dataset.
For new users, Soyle App offers 250,000 symbols for free, equivalent to 125 pages. Then, billing is usage-based, providing flexible access for diverse user needs.
