What makes a language fall asleep? And what does it take to wake one up?
Speak to Awaken is a two part virtual reality series that throws light on indigenous languages from Nepal and Taiwan that find themselves at different stages on their reclamation journey. Placing these stories side by side demonstrates how it is micro communities that are leading the fight to be heard, and offers a glimpse of the invaluable, unique worldviews that these languages contain.In each episode of Speak to Awaken, users will speak words in an indigenous language to stand in solidarity with the community behind its reclamation. This act triggers artificial intelligence (AI) enabled voice based interactions, which carve the user’s path through the narrative, unlocking storyworlds related to the specific words. The interactive feature will be enabled by a neural network trained for speech recognition. In order for this to function, we need to collect as many diverse audio samples of each word used in the series as we possibly can.
That’s where you come in. Get involved, and lend your voice to the reclamation of the special languages we highlight in this documentary series.
Go to the website: Speak to Awaken