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The head of Kaitaia-based Te Hiku Media, Peter Lucas Jones, has been named in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2024 for the work his team is doing to preserve te reo Maori using artificial intelligence technology.
Te Hiku has built its own automatic speech recognition model, using 30 years’ worth of archival recordings from the radio station.
Its speech-to-text model now transcribes Te Reo with 92 percent accuracy, outperforming similar attempts by major international tech companies.
Mr Jones says the technology must be owned by and directly benefit Māori because, in the digital world, data is like land.
“If we do not have control, governance, and ongoing guardianship of our data as Indigenous people, we will be landless in the digital world, too.”
He hopes Te Hiku’s efforts go far beyond sheer language acquisition. “If we can enhance the way that someone respects another language, we too may be able to shape the way they consider other people,” he says.
“This is about Mana motuhake: being in control of one’s destiny, and growing an economic future for your people when that has largely been diminished through the process of colonisation.”
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