Why Google Maps can’t pronounce Māori place names

Peter-Lucas Jones says the quality benchmark for te reo pronunciation is much lower for global tech companies such as Google.

It is unacceptable that AI tools and global tech companies are still lagging in te reo pronunciation, a Māori tech innovator says.

Peter-Lucas Jones is chief executive of Far North-based Te Hiku Media and earlier this month was named in Time magazine’s top 100 AI leaders list of 2024.

The company has been developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools that transcribe te reo Māori, give pronunciation feedback, and turn text into speech at a 92% accuracy rate, making it the best in the world.

Jones said the quality benchmark for te reo pronunciation is much lower for global tech companies such as Google, but the bigger problem is that no proficient Māori language speakers are involved in the creation of AI tools.

“When we look at Open AI tools and Google tools, while they are making big advances, it’s clear there are no proficient Māori language speakers involved, because if there were, they wouldn’t release tools with such bad pronunciation.”

Māori tech innovator Peter-Lucas Jones at the Time Magazine awards. Photo / Supplied

It is important to recognise that big tech is not going to save te reo Māori, he said.

Are apps like Google Maps keeping up with te reo pronunciation?

“I think the solution from my perspective is to benchmark against Māori standards, not some global benchmark that was established for all languages by people with no Māori language expertise or understanding of the language decline context here in New Zealand.

“This means investing in local data science solutions that support accuracy and precision.”

Another part of the solution included investing in Māori lead organisations with proficiency in te reo, Jones said.

“When we think about pronunciation I guess we’ve got to make a decision, are we looking for excellence or are we happy with mediocre? Sometimes purposefully doing harm to a language is worse than doing nothing at all.”

Māori language models – such as Te Hiku Media’s model – provide an opportunity to set the benchmark much higher, he said.

“Providing quality examples of pronunciations like place names ... these enhance the language acquisition opportunities for language learners and mispronunciation often obscures the intelligence we hope to convey through speech ... What I would say is that accepting a 50% accuracy as a benchmark for te reo Māori is just unacceptable.”