This robot speaks endangered Native American languages : NPR

Holden Hoy (right) is building a robot to help him learn the Ojibwe language Anishinaabemowin, an endangered Native American language. Hoy’s mentor, Danielle Boyer (left), is teaching him skills including coding and electrical circuitry.

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SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. — The idea came to Danielle Boyer in a toy store. The inspiration? It was Tickle Me Elmo.

“Whenever you’d press his belly, he would talk, and he would teach you things,” she said. “There are toys that teach us in English, but there aren’t toys that teach us Anishinaabemowin. And I wanted that to be different.”

Anishinaabemowin includes the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe languages. Exact estimates vary, but there are fewer than 10,000 people in the U.S. who speak Anishinaabemowin. That number is around 25,000 in Canada. Some Native languages have just a few dozen fluent speakerswhile others have none.

Boyer has seen how quickly language loss can happen. Her grandmother speaks Anishinaabemowinbut she is one of the last fluent speakers of their dialect.

“It is devastating to feel like your language could be lost,” said Boyer, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. “You lose your culture, you lose a way to describe who you are.”

U.S. Indian boarding schools played a major role in the loss of Indigenous languages. Children separated from their families were taught, sometimes violently, not to speak their native tongues, and many did not pass them on to their children.

Today, some Native youth are learning their languages in schools. But Boyer said many of them still aren’t invested. “They see it as another homework assignment.”

Boyer and Hoy work on some last-minute adjustments to his AI-powered SkoBot before presenting at his school’s end-of-year showcase, called the STEAM Museum.

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That’s why she invented the SkoBot. It’s a customizable toy robot designed to get Indigenous children excited to learn their languages.

“I can say ‘Hey SkoBot, what is bear?’ And it will say, ‘Bear is know, know,’ and it’ll repeat it, right? So I can say, ‘What is crane?’ It’ll say, ‘Crane is ajijaak, ajijaak.'”

SkoBots use a form of artificial intelligence to speak Indigenous languages, and they’re small enough to mount on the user’s shoulder. They sort of resemble mini R2-D2 droids, from Star Warsexcept these robots are designed to look like woodland creatures and decorated in Native American florals.