The University of Auckland, Photo: RNZ / Yiting Lin
Auckland University is building a new AI tool that will give te reo Māori learners real time, personalised feedback on their pronunciation.
The three-year project is funded with a $1 million research grant from the Ministry of Business and Innovation's Smart Ideas.
Head of Auckland Universities' Te Puna Wananga, Dr Piata Allen told Checkpoint the idea is to give te reo Māori learners confidence so they use more te reo more of the time.
Allen (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hinemanu, Ngā Wairiki Ngāti Apa) said the AI tool will give real time feedback to users who are speaking te reo Māori and give feedback on the specific sounds they are making.
"When you pronounce sounds you are... making different shapes with your mouth, you are positioning your tongue differently to make different sounds, so in order to make the sounds you want to make you've got to get those things right and what the app is going to do is to help you understand what the sounds are that you might be struggling with and how to correct that."
The te reo Māori 'R' sound is one that can cause new learners some trouble, she said.
"Quite commonly we say that you need to roll your Rs, however in te reo Māori actually the R sound is a tap or a flap. Which is quite similar to the sound you make when you say words like Daddy, Maddie, Paddy, those types of sounds, so you get that double d sound, that tap, you just tap the roof of your mouth once."
Allen said the app will be able to explain to people the movement they need to make in order to get the sound they are trying to make and how to adjust.
"Rather than just tell people that this is right and that is wrong we are able to give them a bit more specific feedback."
Currently Auckland University runs an an online pronunciation course where students record themselves reading a bilingual text then switch between pronunciation, the tutors then listen to the sounds they are making and give them feedback on a syllable basis, she said.
"That's quite labour intensive and quite time intensive and we aren't able to scale that as widely as we'd like, so incorporating AI into that process means we're able to give more people access."
Allen said that giving feedback on articulation of sounds is a specific skill that people need to be trained in to do effectively.
The language model will be trained on the existing repository of recorded te reo, such as from the archives of iwi radio stations, she said.
"So we do have a significant repository of te reo Māori sounds, however what we will need to do is train a model around the acceptable range of pronunciation that we are looking for, because there is always going to be a range with language."
When it comes to training a language model some sort of framework is needed in order to train the model, Allen said, so the first thing to do is establish what the range is for te reo Māori.
The project is running for three years and Allen said they have that to establish te range of correct pronunciation, to develop the feedback tool, to test it with a group of users and to look at how it can be scaled from there.
"We want to have as many people using the tool as possible, so we really want it to be available far and wide, exactly how we scale that we haven't quite worked that through yet, we're just going to be focussing on the research at this stage but then as we progress through the project we'll be looking at how we can scale it."
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