The radio station that decided te reo Māori was worth building for
Kaitāia, Northland, New Zealand · Peter-Lucas Jones
Published July 13, 2026
When global speech AI had no room for their language, a small radio station in Kaitāia built its own, and made sure the data stayed in Māori hands.
The story
The person and the place
Peter-Lucas Jones runs Te Hiku Media, a Māori-run radio and TV station in Kaitāia, a small town at the top of New Zealand's North Island. For decades, the station held boxes of cassette tapes full of te reo Māori recordings that almost no one outside the community would ever hear.
The problem Peter-Lucas cared about
Te reo Māori is a language at risk, and the big speech AI models coming out of Silicon Valley weren't built with it in mind. Keoni Mahelona, the station's chief technology officer, has described what the elders decided about that archive: that the stories should be made accessible online for their own community.
The agency moment
Jones and Te Hiku Media didn't lobby Google or wait for Meta to notice. They decided to build their own speech model and to own the data behind it. As Jones put it, indigenous communities like his "don't only want to be the users of technology, we want to be the developers of it too." Then they called on their own community to help build it.
What changed
The community answered fast. By NVIDIA's account of the project, 2,500 people came forward, and inside ten days their readings from a 200,000-phrase bank added up to more than 300 hours of labeled speech. The model built on those voices gets te reo Māori transcription right 92% of the time, and NVIDIA puts bilingual English-te reo speech at 82%. Other indigenous communities took note: NVIDIA reports that Native Hawaiians and the Mohawk have speech projects of their own now underway.
The move worth copying
Jones has a plain way of explaining why ownership mattered as much as accuracy: "When we think about the ownership of data, when we think about intellectual property rights, data is like land." Nobody else was going to protect it for them, so they built it themselves. Jones's line is the one to carry: data is like land. If someone is deciding what happens to your community's, this is the version worth pointing at.
"We want to be the developers of it too." — Peter-Lucas Jones, chief executive, Te Hiku Media, to RNZ
Verified sources
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Sources last verified July 30, 2026.