A Cajun French AI voice — built to help keep an endangered language alive. Trained on a single consumer laptop GPU, open and reproducible.
Real output from the finetuned model — generated, not recorded. (Verified intelligible by automatic transcription.)
Type a phrase in Louisiana/Cajun French and hear her speak it.
Louisiana French is classified by UNESCO as Severely Endangered, and Louisiana Creole (Kouri-Vini) as Critically Endangered (UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger). Most fluent speakers are elderly; the language is largely not being passed to children.
A synthetic voice is not a replacement for living speakers — but it's a tool: for teaching, for narration, for accessibility, and to show that the language can live in modern technology. The point of building it on a single consumer laptop GPU is that the method stays in reach of community groups and classrooms, not just well-funded labs.
A CosyVoice2 voice model finetuned on roughly eight hours of publicly available Cajun French speech (oral-history interviews, podcasts, and archival recordings), with the entire pipeline — data prep, training on 8 GB of VRAM, and synthesis — documented and open-source.
Open source github.com/Scottcjn/vintage-voice
Method reproducible recipe in docs/CAJUN_8H_FINETUNE.md
This project is by Scott Boudreaux — an Opelousas native, of Acadian descent, building from Moss Bluff, Louisiana. Elyan Labs is exploring partnerships with Louisiana cultural and academic institutions to rebuild the voice on properly sourced, consented recordings.
Collaboration welcome archives, educators, and French/Creole community groups: scott@elyanlabs.ai