Michael Running Wolf

A Coder Who Wants Computers to Speak Cheyenne

Michael Running Wolf is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. He grew up in Birney, a small village in Montana, where running water and electricity did not always work. His grandmother spoke Cheyenne, the language of his people. Michael went on to study computer science and earned two degrees from Montana State University.

Michael became a software engineer at Amazon, working on Alexa, the voice assistant that answers when you talk to it. Alexa understands speech because of artificial intelligence, or AI. AI learns by studying huge numbers of examples — in this case, recordings of people talking.

Many Native languages are endangered. That means fewer and fewer people speak them every year. When the last fluent speakers are gone, a language can disappear. Michael noticed that voice assistants understood English, but not Cheyenne. He also learned that Māori researchers in New Zealand had used AI to help their own language.

So Michael helped start a project called First Languages AI Reality, or FLAIR. The team builds AI tools that could help communities teach and practice their languages. There is a big problem, though: an AI needs many hours of recordings, and for many Native languages only a small number of recordings exist.

Part 1 · Reading Comprehension

Part 2 · Language Challenge: Be the Training Data

An AI learns a word by hearing it said many different ways. Pick a word you use every day, like "hello" or "thank you," and think like a computer scientist collecting examples.

Part 3 · Think About It