Māori are trying to save their language from Big Tech

In March 2018, Peter-Lucas Jones and the ten other staff at Te Hiku Media, a small non-profit radio station nestled just below New Zealand's most northern tip, were in disbelief. In ten days, thanks to a competition it had started, Māori speakers across New Zealand had recorded over 300 hours of annotated audio in their mother tongue. It was enough data to build language tech for te reo Māori, the Māori language – including automatic speech recognition and speech-to-text. The small staff of Māori language broadcasters and one engineer were about to become pioneers in indigenous speech recognition technology. But building the tools was only half the battle. Te Hiku soon found itself fending off corporate entities trying to develop their own indigenous data sets and resisting detrimental western approaches to data sharing.