The innovative project of developing automatic speech recognition of the Epic of King Gesar and the Gesar studies was launched recently in Lhasa and is expected to be completed in five years, China Tibet News reported.

Jointly undertaken by Tibet University and Peking University, the project is a major national project of 2015. It aims to apply modern technology to protecting and developing the epic. Based on the research on the Epic of King Gesar, the project studies automatic speech recognition by the interdisciplinary research methods of intelligence studies and information technology.

The project marks a historic breakthrough in protecting the epic, and will open up a new direction for the research on the story-telling of the Epic of King Gesar.

The Epic of King Gesar, the world's longest heroic epic tells about the heroic deeds of the Tibetan king. King Gesar is a folk epic that is popular in the Tibetan-inhabited areas on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of China. He fought demons and drove off monsters and did many good deeds for people. Finally, King Gesar had completed all the tasks commissioned by the Buddha and returned to heaven. King Gesar is a heroic epic that was originated frin and developed on Tibetan folk literature of ancient myths and legends, poems, proverbs. It represents the highest achievement of the folk culture and oral narrative art. The Epic of King Gesar has been put on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by the United Nations.