A Māori technology advocate is looking to use artificial intelligence technology to revive up to six distinct Ngāti Porou dialects.
Barry Soutar has retired from Tamaki Makaurau to Waiapu, near Ruatoria, where he’s helping to prepare the next generation of tāne for the paepae.
After one of his students told him he missed his koro’s dialect, he decided to apply his AI expertise to some of the recordings in the archives.
“I went, ‘hey boy, you realise we can actually reconstruct it?’ Because its only tech. Its only process. And so I explained to him how that could happen – and then a year later we’re here,” Mr Soutar says.
The program aims to give fluent younger speakers voice and text cues to follow – which can help revive a dialect within a few months.
