<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/artificial-intelligence-teens-indigenous-language-preservation-brazil/>
"Huddled in small groups around laptops, 20 Brazilian teenagers — a group
including TikTok influencers and gamers — are using an app to build a skill
that’s vital to the future of their entire community.
The teenagers belong to the Guarani Indigenous people, based in a community two
hours from São Paulo, and they are fluent in speaking both Portuguese and their
mother tongue, Guarani Mbya. But when it comes to writing, they often default
to Portuguese as that’s what they were first taught to write in, putting the
Guarani Mbya language in its written form at risk of disappearing.
But since March of this year, they’ve been using an app to improve their
ability to write in Guarani Mbya. The “Linguistic Assistant” app works like the
autocorrect and text suggestion feature on cell phones to help them build on
the sentences they start writing themselves.
The app is part of a project funded by IBM to create AI tools to help preserve
and expand the use of Indigenous languages in Brazil. The students — who make
up the sole high school class across seven villages of around 3,000 people, on
a reservation of 23,000 square miles — were nominated by their wider community
to be the focus of IBM’s AI for Indigenous languages social impact work in
their region.
The results so far are promising, according to Dr. Claudio Pinhanez, an AI
specialist at IBM and visiting professor at the University of São Paulo (USP),
who is leading the project. “By the end of the semester, we saw they were
starting to write longer sentences on their own in their language. The progress
they were making is amazing,” he says."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
