Jonathan Abrams, The New York Times; How Teaching A.I. to Speak Cajun Can Help Save a Language
By feeding centuries-old nursery rhymes and folklore recordings into their own model, linguists in Louisiana hope to help a community control its digital destiny.
"Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered, a notion reinforced by Alexa’s overlooking Balfa.
In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews.
Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age."
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