How AI could help prevent languages from disappearing

I’m fascinated by how AI could help prevent languages from disappearing entirely. Most TTS development focuses on major languages with massive datasets, but there are over 7,000 languages worldwide, and many are at risk of extinction. What excites me is the potential for AI to create voice synthesis for languages that might only have a few hundred speakers left. This is technology serving humanity and cultural preservation at its best! When a language dies, we lose unique ways of thinking about the world, specific knowledge systems, and cultural memory that can’t be translated. -Claudia Ng writing in Toward Data Science