Over 77% of North American languages are endangered, with 92% in USA, according to UNESCO tracking. Indigenous communities need a game changing approach to language education using advanced immersive AI technology. The First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR) initiative is being created to enable the next chapter in Indigenous language reclamation.
The development of ASR for a new language or domain typically requires the collection of hundreds of hours of data. To serve the crucial and time-sensitive needs of Indigenous languages, FLAIR’s goal is to develop a method for rapid creation of custom automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for Indigenous languages. FLAIR’s foundational ASR research will initially focus on the languages spanning British Columbia and the Northwest Territories in Canada and Washington State in USA. We anticipate that the resulting system for rapid ASR development will solve similar problems for the thousands of languages used by other under-resourced/underserved speech communities around the world.
Indigenous, Language, Machine Learning, Marginalized, Social Change, Decolonization Michael Running Wolf (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota/Blackfeet) was raised in a rural prairie village in Montana with intermittent water and electricity; naturally he has a Master’s of Science in Computer Science, is a former engineer for Amazon’s Alexa, former faculty at Northeastern University, and is pursuing a PhD in CS at McGill University. Michael is researching Indigenous language and culture reclamation using immersive technologies (AR/VR) and artificial intelligence. His work has been awarded a MIT Solve Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Patrick McGovern AI for Humanity Prize. Through the ethical application of AI and advanced technology respecting Indigenous ways of knowing he is contributing to the ecology of thought represented by the Indigenous. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Add comment