ElkarOla is a strategic research project for the 2015-2016 period which sets out to create the basic technological resources for Basque and develop tools and applications using these resources to ensure that Basque enjoys good health during the digital age.
 
Since 2002 various strategic research projects have been set up for the digital development of Basque. The first was Hizking21; then came AnHitz; later, Berbatek; after that, Ber2tek; and finally, ElkarOla. In recent years these projects have been run under the leadership of Elhuyar even though they have been realised and developed in collaboration with different research centres and universities.
 
The main aim of all these projects is to develop language technologies for voice and multimedia to act as a support for the economic sector of the language industry made up of the translation, teaching and content sectors in order to be competitive in this digital, interconnected, multilingual world, and to enjoy good health in this language environment.
 
To achieve these aims, besides maintaining priority relations with many companies in the language industry, the members who participate in these projects have a community of scientists and researchers who have the necessary critical mass and international prestige.
 
These projects have focussed on and continue to focus on applications. Without neglecting basic research, they endeavour to come up with experimental applications so that the companies working in the fields of translation, education and content will eventually develop them and turn them into products.
 
Work has been done in different fields and many of the resources that Basque now has have been achieved through these projects: spell checkers, corpora, work done on terminology extraction, search engines, voice synthesis, voice recognition, etc.
 
While ElkarOla has been in force, besides continuing to work on these areas we have also moved on to creating applications for other fields as many technologies are by now sufficiently developed. We are developing applications for the business and industrial world (management of online reputation, person-machine interfaces, etc.) as well as the healthcare sector (pharmacovigilance, disabilities, etc.).