https://spectrum.ieee.org/indigenous-ai-voice-models-maori
"New Zealand is a country famed for its dramatic landscapes, but its linguistic
landscape is arguably just as interesting. Of its three official languages,
only te reo Māori (the Māori language) could be described as indigenous. Though
spoken fluently by just 4.3 percent of the population, national statistics show
that about 30 percent of New Zealanders can speak more than a few words or
phrases of the language.
But ask ChatGPT to write te reo Māori and it will oblige, fluently answering
your questions in the standardized form of the language taught in schools and
broadcast on national television. Claude and Perplexity can do the same. This
impressive language performance is built on text and audio produced by Māori
communities and academics, which was scraped and ingested without their
permission, processed outside New Zealand, and returned to users through
interfaces owned by large technology companies. For Māori, that is a problem.
“These companies overseas have the resources to produce AI models that work
well,” says Te Taka Keegan, a professor at the University of Waikato and
codirector of its Artificial Intelligence Institute. “But they scraped all of
that data with no input from us, and we don’t own the output. Our language is
the most important conveyor we have for our knowledge.…yet we see technology
developed outside of Aotearoa [New Zealand] get more and more control over the
transfer of that knowledge.”
Motivated by this need for “sovereign digital systems,” as Keegan calls it, he
and Kingsley Eng, Keegan’s master’s student at the time, set out to develop a
high-fidelity synthetic voice—a text-to-speech system, in other words—for a
specific dialect of te reo Māori. Every technical decision Keegan and Eng made
along the way was shaped by a foundational constraint typically ignored by the
AI sector—that this synthetic voice, and everything used to build it, must
remain owned by the people who speak that dialect. What they produced, they
hope, offers a replicable blueprint for other minority language communities
around the world."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: May 26, 2026
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-26-159268484
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
