A Good in Progress collection
Communities keeping their languages alive with AI
Communities are building speech and language tools for languages that commercial systems have overlooked. The people in these stories work with recordings, grammar rules, elders, and learners. They care about who controls the data and the tools as much as what the technology can do.
Curated by Good in Progress. Collection updated .
How are communities using AI to preserve languages?
Te Hiku Media built speech tools from community recordings of te reo Māori. Jared Coleman works with grammar rules and elders' knowledge to build tools for Owens Valley Paiute. Michael Running Wolf helps Indigenous communities develop language technology they can own. Each started with the language and the people who speak it.
01 · New Zealand
Te Hiku Media: speech tools in Māori hands
Peter-Lucas Jones and Te Hiku Media called on their community to help build a speech model for te reo Māori. People donated their voices, and the station made sure the language data stayed in Māori hands.
The radio station that decided te reo Māori was worth building forSource: NVIDIA Blog, the company whose AI tools the project runs on
02 · Canada
Michael Running Wolf: communities owning the tools
Running Wolf left Amazon's Alexa team to help Indigenous communities shape their own language technology through FLAIR. He also co-founded the Lakota AI Code Camp, where rural South Dakota students could start with no coding experience.
Michael Running Wolf left Amazon so Indigenous tribes could own their own AI.Source: Prism Reports
03 · California, USA
Jared Coleman: teaching a system one rule at a time
Coleman could not find a language tool built for Owens Valley Paiute. Working with grammar rules and elders' knowledge, Coleman built Kubishi to support looking up words, making sentences, and translation.
Coleman wanted a Rosetta Stone for Owens Valley Paiute. There wasn't one, so Coleman built one.Source: WHYY
Whose knowledge, whose decisions?
Coleman started with a dictionary and recordings of elders, including a great-great-great-grandfather's voice. Te Hiku Media started with its own community. Know someone keeping a language alive? Share one of these stories with them, or tell us about what they're building.