Narrate: A User-Driven Web Application for Developing Speech Corpora in Endangered Philippine Languages and Dialect

Society gradually forgets the start of a language and starts to lose its culture and traditions; these are called endangered languages. Many languages in the Philippines fall under the endangered language that needs to be preserved so the next generation can savor its cultural richness. The preservation can be done with the help of technology. The use of digital repositories for the public can preserve endangered languages. A few online repositories contain files of endangered languages, such as audio files. However, some online repositories are coherently restricted to the public and cover only a specific group of countries of their endangered languages. With this premise, the researcher came up with the idea to develop an online repository of audio and text files of endangered languages that a website user can upload that the public can download. The student developers created a web application named Narrate with another functionality: a recording tool. The project author can record the endangered language’s speech, which can be immediately uploaded to the community’s platform. Narrate was developed through the agile software development cycle due to the short time allotted and the small team that designed the application. In the testing phase, the team utilized Agile testing, a core part of the agile development cycle, to fit the small group of student developers using the automated unit, integration testing, manual system, and usability testing. The Mean completion time metric measured the task for every given scenario during the test. The result shows it requires less than 30 seconds to perform most of the tasks in the system, but for more complex tasks, it requires an average of one (1) to two (2) seconds to finish the task.