During the Accelerating Together with AI congress hosted by Platform AI & Government, government organisations, knowledge institutions and public partners signed a letter of intent to collaborate on HOSAN: High-Quality and Sovereign Speech Recognition for Dutch. By signing, the participating organisations expressed their support for a shared ambition to develop high-quality, reliable, and digitally sovereign speech recognition for Dutch-speaking regions worldwide.
Speech is increasingly the primary way people interact with technology. Citizens now communicate with customer services, government agencies, healthcare providers, and digital assistants via voice. As a result, automatic transcription, subtitling, and voice-controlled applications are becoming more important across sectors such as government, media, education, healthcare, and security.
Speech technology as a public basic facility
Many current speech models are developed outside the Netherlands and are therefore insufficiently tailored to the Dutch language area. Consider dialects, regional accents, street language, and domain-specific terminology. These are often poorly recognised and require extensive post-processing. Additionally, dependence on foreign technology, data, and infrastructure is growing. HOSAN safeguards public values such as transparency, security, and digital sovereignty.
Practical implementation of digital sovereignty
The launch of HOSAN aligns with the growing focus on digital autonomy and technological resilience in the Netherlands and across Europe. In recent years, large language models have attracted significant attention. HOSAN demonstrates that speech technology is also a strategic building block of the future digital infrastructure.
Collaboration between government, science, and the public sector
As part of the Netherlands’ Digitalisation Strategy (NDS), Platform AI & Government, together with the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), is working with public and private partners to responsibly harness and scale AI’s opportunities. The HOSAN initiative collaborates with, among others, Sound & Vision, NPO, the National Police, the University of Twente, Radboud University, the Ministry of Justice and Security (JenV), the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate (EZK), DUO, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Royal Marechaussee, SURF, Kennisnet, Taalunie, the Digital Coexistence Alliance, and ICTU.
