Meet the robots programmed by kids to speak their Indigenous languages

A Sault Ste. Marie Tribe member, Danielle Boyer, has invented a customisable toy robot called the SkoBot, designed to help Native American children learn their Indigenous languages, and has founded a nonprofit that mentors hundreds of Native youth across the United States in building the devices themselves. Inspired partly by Tickle Me Elmo, the initiative aims to make language preservation engaging for a generation that often views heritage lessons as an unwelcome chore, while also teaching participants practical STEM and robotics skills. The project comes against a backdrop of historic suppression of Native languages by US Indian boarding schools, making tools like this significant for cultural survival.

The shoulder-mounted robots, styled to resemble woodland creatures and decorated with Native floral designs, use artificial intelligence to recognise trigger words and play back prerecorded audio in the relevant Indigenous language, deliberately avoiding the errors generative AI can produce. One young participant, 12-year-old Ojibwe student Holden Hoy from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, has built his own SkoBot, named Sabe after the Bigfoot figure, with his mother Jocelyn also finding the process a way to reconnect with her heritage. The Anishinaabemowin language group, which includes Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe, has fewer than 10,000 speakers in the US and around 25,000 in Canada, underlining the urgency behind efforts to keep it alive.