Australia's Indigenous population is rich in linguistic diversity, with over 300 languages spoken across different communities. Some of the languages can be as distinct as Japanese is to German. But many are at risk of becoming extinct because they are not widely accessible and have little presence in the digital space. Professor Janet Wiles is a researcher with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, known as CoEDL, which has been working to transcribe and preserve endangered languages. She says one of the biggest barriers to documenting languages is transcription. "How transcription is done at the moment is linguists select small parts of the audio that might be unique words, unique situations or interesting parts of grammar, and they listen to the audio and they transcribe it," she told SBS News.

Opie itself could be more sophisticated, says Wiles, but the available speech-to-text technology that could be used to dictate and store the language is not as advanced as people may believe when they hear the word "robot," she says. The main artificial intelligence-based transcription services provided by Google or IBM support around 100 languages and don't include indigenous dialects in Australia. Local researchers would need to develop a technology for transcribing an indigenous language, but such an approach is time consuming and expensive to implement.