The Future of Maori Language Learning

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We have thousands of hours of high quality Maori data about, you know, not just sort of voice data in terms of training speech models, et cetera. And we're still doing sort of regional television programming and live streaming important community events next week. In addition to all that, we've got eight A 100s - four with 80 gigs and four with 40 gigs sitting in this very derelict, musky building in Kaitaya training machine learning models. We can help people improve their pronunciation to help bring back the native sound because through colonization, English sound has been leaking its way into today's indigenous languages.

Paris Marx is joined by Keoni Mahelona to discuss the colonial nature of data extraction by major tech companies, and how Te Hiku takes a very different approach to revitalize the Māori language.

Keoni Mahelona is the Chief Technology Officer at Te Hiku Media. Follow Keoni on Twitter at @mahelona.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Keoni and some of his colleagues wrote about why OpenAI’s Whisper is another example of colonialism.
Wired and MIT Tech Review have written about the work Te Hiku is doing with Māori language in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Mark Zuckerberg owns a lot of land in Hawaiʻi, and it’s quite controversial.

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