Tech roundup: AI to preserve indigenous languages?

Welcome to our Tech Roundup, where we bring you the biggest stories in technology and innovation in Brazil and Latin America. This week: Using AI to strengthen and preserve indigenous languages.

AI can enable indigenous language preservation projects

A joint project of the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI) of the University of São Paulo (USP) and IBM Research is testing the use of AI — more specifically, natural language processing tools — with a group of about 30 high school students from a community called Tenonde Porã, in the southern part of the city of São Paulo. 

State of play. The students are fluent speakers of Mbya Guarani, a variant of the indigenous Tupi Guarani language, but have difficulty writing in it because they were first educated in Portuguese. The idea is to help them overcome this literacy barrier with the help of AI-powered audio-to-text and translation tools — which means working on the problem while simultaneously digitally engaging the community and developing apps that can be used in similar projects with other indigenous languages. 

• The goal is to have a tool that not only corrects spelling, but also predicts words — as text software and applications already do for other languages. But even before that, the tool is expected to be a way for linguists to speed up their work with endangered languages.

Why it matters. Doing something like this the traditional way, building software from scratch based on linguists’ fieldwork, would require a lot...