Canada's National Research Council Builds Open AI Speech Tools for 27 Indigenous Languages

The National Research Council (NRC), Canada's federal science and research agency, runs the Indigenous Languages Technology (ILT) project to build open speech and text tools for Indigenous languages in collaboration with Carleton University and Indigenous language experts. Its ReadAlong Studio lets communities turn text into synchronized audio 'read-alongs'; Speech Generation for Indigenous Language Education (SGILE) provides text-to-speech for classrooms; and tools such as Kawennón:nis and Gramble support verb conjugation in polysynthetic languages including Mohawk.
The project has been applied to at least 27 Indigenous languages from several language families, including Inuktut, Plains Cree, Michif, Tŝilhqot'in, N̓syilxčn̓ and other Algonquian languages. Its development has been shaped since 2018 by an Indigenous advisory committee, and the underlying methodology — an 'empowerment-oriented' approach evaluated through qualitative review by fluent speakers — was peer-reviewed at the 2020 International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING).
By May 2024, ReadAlong Studio had drawn more than 1,800 visitors from all six inhabited continents. That is a real but modest usage base for a national program tied to Canada's broader Indigenous Languages Act funding envelope (2019–2029): the published evidence establishes technical coverage and a credible evaluation method, not yet large-scale adoption or measured learning outcomes for Indigenous-language speakers.

Read the full analysis: https://nrc.canada.ca/en/research-development/research-collaboration/programs/canadian-indigenous-languages-technology-project