Wai Inc.

Past

Wai Inc. is a social enterprise aiming to reclaim indigenous sovereignty through Machine Learning.

The company was started by Keoni Mahelona. In the past 4 years he's been working with Te Hiku Media, a Māori non for profit whose goal is to revitalize, promote, and perpetuate ngā reo Māori o Te Hiku o Te Ika. Keoni was instrumental in helping Te Hiku Media move into the digital space by leveraging open source hardware and software to live stream events in 2014 on a shoe string budget. He also built the Whare Kōrero, Te Hiku Media's digital platform which powers their website and media management at tehiku.nz. Since then, Te Hiku Media's online viewership has grown significantly, and the organization is pioneering many innovative projects for te reo Māori.

Present

Today, we've built the first automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for te reo Māori using Mozilla's open sourced DeepSpeech. We're making te reo Māori ASR available through an API at koreromaori.io. We also built and open sourced a web app for corpus collection at koreromaori.com.

We're releasing native mobile apps for koreromaori.com, which will help us reach more people as web based audio capture doesn't work well on older browsers and devices.

Future

Our future work includes,

Building pronunciation models through for Pacific languages
Text to speech (TTS) for Pacific languages
Multilingual speech processing tools as many indigenous languages are heavily influence by colonial languages

Company

Even in 2018, we don't really have legal structures for Social Enterprises. Wai Inc. is structured as a normal company in New Zealand (LTD) with a major ownership by The Wai Foundation. The Wai Foundation will be a registered charity whose mission will be to support projects that bring positive outcomes to communities through technology and innovation.

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