Māori Text-to-Speech Model Spurns Big Tech's Values
Researchers at the University of Waikato built a high-fidelity text-to-speech system for a specific dialect of te reo Maori, designed so the synthetic voice and its training data remain owned by the people who speak that dialect. The project responds to concerns that big technology companies scraped Maori language data without permission and now control how that knowledge is transferred. The team hopes the approach offers a replicable blueprint for other minority language communities.
Key Takeaways
- New Zealand is a country famed for its dramatic landscapes, but its linguistic landscape is arguably just as interesting.
Of its three official languages, only te reo Māori (the Māori language) could be described as indigenous.
- This impressive language performance is built on text and audio produced by Māori communities and academics, which was scraped and ingested without their permission, processed outside New Zealand, and returned to users through interfaces owned by large technology companies.
"These companies overseas have the resources to produce AI models that work well," says Te Taka Keegan , a professor at the University of Waikato and codirector of its Artificial Intelligence Institute.
- What they produced, they hope, offers a replicable blueprint for other minority language communities around the world.
Challenges in Māori AI Voice Models AI voice models are predominantly built in English, so applying those models to other languages can lead to errors.
- In addition, te reo Māori is considered a low-resource language , because, compared with a language like English or Chinese, there's relatively little potential training data in the form of text, datasets, or recorded speech available in digital formats.
To address this problem, Keegan recruited Ngaringi Katipa -a translator, educator, and language mentor -to be the consenting human voice behind the tool.
- "Later, we expanded the dataset by recording from a comprehensive list of sentences and words-including very rare words-given to us by Te Taka's brother Peter , who is a Māori linguistics expert."
New Zealand is a country famed for its dramatic landscapes, but its linguistic landscape is arguably just as interesting. Of its three official languages, only te reo Māori (the Māori language) could be described as indigenous. Though spoken fluently by just 4.3 percent of the population, national statistics show that about 30 percent of New Zealanders can speak more than a few words or phrases of the language.
But ask ChatGPT to write te reo Māori and it will oblige, fluently answering your questions in the standardized form of the language taught in schools and broadcast on national television. Claude and Perplexity can do the same. This impressive language performance is built on text and audio produced by Māori communities and academics, which was scraped and ingested without their permission, processed outside New Zealand, and returned to users through interfaces owned by large technology companies.
"These companies overseas have the resources to produce AI models that work well," says Te Taka Keegan , a professor at the University of Waikato and codirector of its Artificial Intelligence Institute. "But they scraped all of that data with no input from us, and we don't own the output. Our language is the most important conveyor we have for our knowledge....yet we see technology developed outside of Aotearoa [New Zealand] get more and more control over the transfer of that knowledge."
For more details please read the original article at IEEE Spectrum AI.
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