The radio station that decided te reo Māori was worth building for
Kaitāia, Northland, New Zealand · Peter-Lucas Jones
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
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. The elders wanted their recordings made accessible to their own community, not left to sit in boxes, and no outside tech company was going to prioritize a language that wasn't profitable enough to model.
The moment they didn't wait
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.
In just ten days, more than 2,500 people signed up to read 200,000-plus phrases aloud, donating over 300 hours of labeled speech. The resulting model now transcribes te reo Māori at 92% accuracy, and bilingual English-te reo speech at 82%. The data-sovereignty approach behind it has since inspired sister projects from Native Hawaiians and the Mohawk people in southeastern Canada.
"We want to be the developers of it too."
Verified sources
Sources
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