Thirty-five years ago, New Zealand adopted a law declaring the official status of Te Reo Māori, the language spoken by the country's indigenous Māori people. Decades of repression put the language, also called simply te reo, under serious threat: only one in four Māori spoke it by 1960, with a very low percentage of speakers among children. Since then, the language has started regaining lost ground, enjoying formally equal status with English and being taught widely to New Zealand schoolchildren. Still, reviving it as a living language takes time and persistence. Lately, the nascent te reo renaissance is gaining added momentum with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).