using tech to preserve indigenous cultures.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. Growing up on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana,

Michael Running Wolf was especially aware

of the importance of language.

For decades, it was illegal under US law

to speak native languages in schools.

And so generations of indigenous children

went without learning them.

Running Wolf grew up to become a computer scientist,

landing a job working on Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa.

A few years ago, he started to wonder how he might get something like Alexa to speak

Cheyenne or other indigenous languages.

That has become his lifelong mission.

I am Michael Runnan-Wulf Jr. I am a PhD student at McGill University and

founder of Indigenous in the AI.

So I'm researching indigenous language voice AI,

specifically making automatic speech recognition for indigenous languages in North America.

My mother speaks Cheyenne and my father speaks Lakota and the idea was to put on a VR headset and be able the and have a naturalistic experience with the main goal being educational material.

Over the past few years, I most recently focused on artificial intelligence because it's a unfortunately a green field

research there has been very little work done in academia on enabling indigenous minority languages

into voice AI like Siri or Google Assistant.

...