Artificial Intelligence and Endangered Languages
By Thongkholal Haokip
The increasing use of virtual digital assistants and multilingual neural machine translation services, which use artificial intelligence to recognise and respond to voice commands or translate voice into text of another language, could increase language endangerment, particularly indigenous peoples who are in the category of critically endangered languages with few thousand, or even less, speakers around the world. The use of natural language processing technology is also unlikely to be extended in the preservation of such languages which has no market value, unless governments or philanthropic and nonprofit organizations intervene on this particular matter.