The Cambridge technologist who built a $50 device to save a language with no written script
Karnataka, India (Soliga Indigenous community); project led from Cambridge University, UK and IIIT Dharwad, India · Arjuna Sathiaseelan, Sarbani Banerjee Belur
Published July 16, 2026
As younger Soliga moved to cities for work, elders worried their unwritten language would disappear with them. A Cambridge University technologist and an IIIT Dharwad professor built it a working voice model from five hours of recordings, running entirely offline on hardware that costs less than $50.
The story
The person and the place
Arjuna Sathiaseelan, founder of the Saving Voices Project and CTO of the Frugal AI Hub at Cambridge University, working with Dr. Sarbani Banerjee Belur, co-founder and assistant professor at IIIT Dharwad, alongside the Soliga Indigenous community in Karnataka, India.
The problem
As younger Soliga migrated to cities for work, elders worried their unwritten language would disappear with them. Commercial speech technology was never built with a language like this in mind.
The moment they didn't wait
Rather than wait for a commercial speech-AI vendor to take an interest in an unwritten Indigenous language, Sathiaseelan and Belur built a custom offline text-to-speech system from scratch, using just five hours of recorded Soliga voice. "With just five hours of voice data, we were able to build a voice model for the Soliga...what we gained is complete data sovereignty, offline deployment on sub-$50 hardware, and a governance structure that elders and community leaders actually trust," Sathiaseelan said.
The working voice model now runs on Raspberry Pi hardware costing under $50, entirely offline, so the community's voice data never has to leave its own devices.
"With just five hours of voice data, we were able to build a voice model for the Soliga...what we gained is complete data sovereignty, offline deployment on sub-$50 hardware, and a governance structure that elders and community leaders actually trust." — Arjuna Sathiaseelan, Rest of World
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