The AI will undergo a selection process to assess its mastery of the Catalan language and culture.

BarcelonaAccent Obert will deploy an urgent plan to enable AI to speak Catalan. To verify if AIs are self-centered and have a good level of Catalan, the organization will administer the official Catalan language and culture exams to leading chatbots in 2026—the same exams taken by citizens, such as university entrance exams, basic skills tests, and proficiency tests up to level C2. This will allow for the objective assessment of Catalan culture in AI and enable the creation of a ranking of the best AIs for Catalan culture. Another challenge is ensuring that all Catalan-language content on the internet is properly tagged so that AIs can detect this information. They also plan to create a federation of Catalan-language content so that AIs can be asked to respond "given that I am Catalan." This means explaining to the AI ​​"what it means to be Catalan," which involves not only language but, above all, cultural background.

"The twelve commercial chatbots can already understand you if you write to them in Catalan, and three of them can converse in Catalan," explains technologist Albert Cuesta, who says he is confident that the number will continue to grow. They are now working with home appliance manufacturers to incorporate Catalan; also with the automotive sector, so that for the moment none of the 10 best-selling cars on the market have infotainment in Catalan, but there are two brands that already include it and two more will do so this year. Accent Obert points out that the presence of Catalan in audiovisual content also needs to be strengthened: there are currently 29,000 titles with audio or subtitles in Catalan on the platforms, 6,800 available and the rest discontinued.

Better online than on the street

"Despite the difficult situation the language faces in the streets, we have good news regarding Catalan on the internet," says Genís Roca, president of Accent Obert, the independent civil entity that safeguards Catalan on the internet and which until a year ago was called Fundació .Cat. "We have had the domain for 20 years .cat"The world's first and most important cultural domain [with a record 116,000 active domains]; we've had the Catalan Wikipedia for 25 years, the first version of its own for a stateless culture; we have the AINA project, managed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which has increased the Catalan AI training corpus 100-fold; we have the tools provided by Softcatalà. What Catalans have accomplished on the Catalan internet in recent years is spectacular," explains Roca.

But global technology presents new challenges every day. The work done in recent years has meant that, by default, AI tools now incorporate Catalan, from Gemini to ChatGPT, including Google's AI engine. "The good news is that AI responds in Catalan, but the problem is that it doesn't think in Catalan. It thinks in Wisconsin and translates into Catalan. We need responses built from the Catalan cultural framework." “We know how to do it, we have a plan, but it will be a long process,” Roca warns. The stakeholders with whom we now have to negotiate are more diverse than when the domain was created. .cat"It was negotiated with ICANN, but there aren't that many access points either," says Roca, who believes the industry will be interested in personalizing the experience for its users.

"With the arrival of artificial intelligence, cultures have to redouble their efforts, and we Catalans are once again entering the general debate to make a proposal," says Genís Roca. "We have the conditions to fight this battle. The internet has a tendency to flatten cultures. Cultures have to defend themselves," continues the president of Accent Obert.

Among the open fronts facing Accent Obert, which functions as a hub for the internet sector in all Catalan-speaking territories (in fact, its board includes entities from across the domain and also manages the domain) .ad, from Andorra), are the new Crit awards to boost the Catalan content creators sector; the Llista.cat websiteTo give visibility to these content creators, which they have quantified at 1,200 accounts; participation in the House of Digital Creation in Catalan that is being built by the Barcelona City Council, and the campaign to configure in Catalan the 25 million devices that are in the Catalan-speaking territories and to speak to the technology by default in Catalan.