MILENA FROM CHICAGO CREATED A CHATBOT THAT SPEAKS IN THE LESKOVAC DIALECT: She wants to preserve the southern dialect from oblivion!

The idea to protect the Prizren–Timok dialect from being forgotten with the help of artificial intelligence came from Milena Šović, an AI engineer who has been living in the United States for nine years. She came from Chicago to Serbia to present her project at the International two-day conference “Artificial Intelligence,” held at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU).

As Milena emphasized, her idea has existed for 30 years—to standardize and digitalize the Prizren–Timok dialect, which she uses as a native of Niš, so that this dialect could become more widely represented in speech.

Milena came up with a chatbot that uses southern Serbian speech in its interactions. The “Leskovac chatbot” is not yet available to the general public, and its “premiere” will take place on October 9 at the conference at SANU.

“When I started working in artificial intelligence, I realized it’s a technology that can help us,” Milena said.

A dictionary and grammar guide are being prepared to assist the chatbot in the Leskovac dialect

“A detailed dictionary and grammar guide are currently being developed, which will be available online and completely free. If you type a word in standard Serbian, you’ll get the corresponding word from the dialect. This dictionary will be used for further chatbot training,” Milena explained.

As a basis for the dialect, she used short stories and anecdotes written by native speakers and prepared a set of basic grammatical rules to ensure the model consistently follows dialect patterns.

“These short stories and anecdotes were written by people from Leskovac and are completely authentic. I created the grammar myself—it was difficult because I’m not a linguist, I’m an engineer. It was a challenge, and I needed help from the people of Leskovac. Each chatbot was manually validated,” Milena said, adding:

What will the online dictionary look like?

“I already have experience creating dictionaries, since I’m the author of the first Serbian-English mathematical dictionary.”

The first chatbot she created was dedicated to Nikola Tesla, and it has already been used in classes at several elementary and high schools, as well as becoming part of the permanent exhibition at the Museum of Science and Technology in Belgrade.

She also created a chatbot dedicated to Branislav Nušić, which communicates exclusively in Serbian and is designed to faithfully reflect the writing style of the famous satirist.

“These chatbots are only part of a larger project, as the idea is to create chatbots for all famous figures from our region, which will be very helpful for children in school,” said Milena Šović.

She emphasized that in the United States, chatbots are widely used not only in everyday life but even more in business.