The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Hello, everybody. My name is Santiago Mendez, and I'm here with my colleagues Gianluca Diana and Delaney Gomez‑Jackson. And we are going to talk to you about Digital Inclusion and the Motorola Initiative that we have called Indigenous Language Support.
And, so, first of all, let us talk a little bit about who we are. So we are part of the Lenovo Group which covers over 180 countries. We have 70,000 employees with more than 30 manufacturing sites spread all across the world. On top of that we have our research and development lab spread out in 18 different countries throughout our total global organisation. And I'm here representing the Lenovo Foundation. Lenovo Foundation is the Lenova charitable arm, and we focus on empower the ones who need it with access to technology and education.
You will see later on from the project that my colleague Delaney is going to talk to you about Digital Inclusion is very close to our heart, and it's completely aligned to our mission. On top of that, we are targeting to impact through our programmes 50 million people and we are on target to achieve that during this year.
And just to show you a little bit about the outreach of our community impact. So as you can see on the map above us we have over 100 partners spread out all over the world. We have different layers. And I'm not going to take you through all of them because it will take us a lot of time. However, today we are going to focus on one very, very specific very also innovative which is indigenous language support which you will see later on.
But on top of that we have created another ‑‑ we have a full set of Digital Inclusion Initiatives. Here I'm going to share with you six of them that you can review. One of them we will go in deep in the next slide. However, I just wanted to very quickly highlight what we are doing in the field.
So let's start with we have ‑‑ we created a solution for people with hearing impairment in Brazil that translates sign language which is called the Deliver Us Project. It's the one you can see.
We have also partnered with Scott Morgan Foundation in the creation of an avatar solution with people with ALS. We empower nonprofits with digital solutions with thanks to our partnership with Tech to the Rescue. In the culture outside we have partnered with universities in China to digitalize cultural heritage movement. Of course multi‑indigenous programme you'll hear in a minute. And we have also worked to support the mental well‑being of Gen Z in different places to make sure they find ways to communicate better.
So having said that, I will hand over to my colleague Gianluca Diana, who will talk to us a little bit about our digital engagement.
>> GIANLUCA DIANA: Thank you, Santi. And before I hand over to Delaney I just want to give you a very brief overview what we are doing in terms of policy and AI because at Lenovo we are strongly committed to responsible AI development both through how we design our technology and how we engage globally with policymakers.
And our mission is really to have advance trustworthy human‑centric AI and to contribute helping shaping ethical, transparent policy through international cooperation. And we really believe that innovation in AI can only try when supported by strong governance aligned with key principals like fairness, accountability, transparency, and human oversight.
Internally we have a comprehensive AI policy framework that guides the way we build and deploy AI systems, ensuring legal compliance, privacy, data protection, and ethical standards across the entire AI lifecycles. And this is enforced through a strong internal governance lead by our responsible AI committee and our Chief AI Officer.
Also we engage externally and Lenovo is very active in contributing to the AI global policy landscape. We are indeed very ‑‑ we are proud to be one of the first signatory of the European Union AI Pact ‑‑ (Background noise).
>> Thank you, very much. Just to say hello to you.
>> GIANLUCA DIANA: Thank you. Nice to meet you.
>> You're going to talk about Motorola?
>> GIANLUCA DIANA: Yes, in a minute. We are also member of the UNESCO AI Business Council and we are supporter of the Canadian Voluntary called Responsible AI, and we also engaging in terms of AI policy roundtable events across the world.
We hold several panel discussions and workshops on responsible AI gathering governmental official institutions and industry experts to have open discussion on responsible AI. Just recently we had one in Italian senate in Spain, but also more at the global level outside of Europe, in Tokyo, Sao Paulo.
And through these initiatives we really want to promote cross‑sectional collaboration in AI society and also in human‑centered ways.
Now I will just hand over to Delaney that will focus on the Motorola Indigenous Language Programme.
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: Thank you, Gianluca. Today I'll be introducing Lenovo Foundation and Motorola's Digital Inclusion of Endangered Indigenous Languages Initiative.
Motorola and Lenovo Foundation's Digital Inclusion Initiative has the main goal of serving communities through raising awareness of endangered indigenous languages. The Digital Inclusion Initiative also aims to address the needs of indigenous people through easier access to technology as well as bring action towards the revitalization of endangered languages. Finally, it aims to help empower future generations of indigenous communities to use technology in their native language.
In 2020 we discovered a gap in the representation of endangered indigenous languages on mobile phones. While smartphones are becoming more globally available and used, they are not fully accessible to many indigenous communities since they lack indigenous language representation.
We took the first step to address this gap by launching the first User Interface in two South American languages, Kaingang and Nheengatu in 2021.
In 2022 we joined UNESCO in the kickoff of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages from 2022 to 2032. We hope that this Digital Inclusion Initiative will help to promote the written usage as well as the overall daily usage of indigenous languages so than technology can become accessible to all in alignment of Lenovo's of "Smarter Technology for All."
The Digital Inclusion Initiative aims to bring awareness to the language revitalization cause. Approximately 40% of the 6,700 languages that are currently spoken are in danger of becoming extinct. UNESCO estimates one indigenous language is lost every two weeks, meaning that by the end of the century almost 3,000 languages will no longer be in use.
In addition to this, often times indigenous languages are not well‑supported by governments and, therefore, do not have many educational or media programmes centered around them. It is important to highlight the revitalization of endangered indigenous languages. As language is an important part of culture, consider the histories, stories, and traditions which are shared through such languages.
By joining in this language revitalization effort, languages and cultures can be uplifted and preserved.
The criteria for selecting languages for a Digital Inclusion Initiative is based on four main pillars. First is the classification regarding how endangered a language is based on factors such as intergenerational transfer.
The UNESCO language endangerment classifications have five levels excluding a non‑endangered status, which are: Vulnerable or endangered, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. We also assess the languages Digital Inclusion status. For example, whether the language has received support from Unicode or Gboard.
Community input and feeling regarding the digitization of a language is paramount to the success of the initiative. We understand the importance of respecting indigenous languages and cultures, and the fact that not every community wants their language digitized the same way, if at all. We must respect all decisions and not push our goals ahead of their needs.
Finally, we assess the availability of subject matter experts to guide the project in the direction of the community's needs. Subject matter experts such as professors or scholars are also often the bridge which helps connect us to these indigenous communities.
Over the past five years we have collaborated with subject matter experts, scholars, community leaders and community members across the world to include indigenous languages onto our smartphones. In 2021 we collaborated with Nheengatu and Kaingang‑speaking communities to localize these languages into the User Interface of our smartphones.
Nheengatu considered to be severely endangered by UNESCO's classification system is spoken by indigenous communities in the Amazon regions of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. Kaingang, a definitely endangered language, is spoken in Southern Brazil.
Likewise, in 2022 we became the first phone manufacturer to fully support Cherokee spoken in the United States on the User Interface of our smartphones. Cherokee is considered to be endangered by UNESCO.
In 2023 we localized Kangri, spoken in Northern India, onto our mobile phones. Additionally, we collaborated with the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to create a writing system that was then made into a smartphone keyboard for the Kuvi language spoken in Eastern India.
For the first time the Kuvi community could type in their native language on their smartphones.
In 2024 we localized Maori, spoken in New Zealand, as well as Ladin, spoken in Italy, onto our phones. And last week we launched our newest edition to the Digital Inclusion Initiative, a Zapotec keyboard supporting five script layouts.
I'll now speak on details of our localization and keyboard creation processes for two particular communities.
Zapotec is an endangered language spoken by about 490,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico. There are more than 50 Zapotec languages, some of which are mutually intelligible with one another. This means that sometimes speakers of different Zapotec languages can understand each other.
UNESCO categorizes the Zapotec languages as definitely endangered since younger generations are becoming increasingly monolingual in Spanish. Zapotec languages can be divided into four main groups: Northern Zapotec, Southern Zapotec, Isthmus Zapotec and Valle Zapotec. The focus of this project was Valle Zapotec because our SME for this phase of the initiative is connected with this region.
For this phase of the initiative we worked with professor Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo, Professor of Linguistics, at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and his also native speaker of Teotitlan Zapotec spoken in the Central Valley of Oaxaca.
Through this project he helped us understand the landscape of the Zapotec languages as well as connecting us to the five communities that were involved in this phase. And these five communities were Sao Pablo Guila, Teotitlan del Valle, Santa Ines Yatzeche, San Bartolome Quialana and San Miguel del Valle.
With Ambrocio's leadership we hope to host workshops in these communities for the development of the keyboard. Each community had a workshop that covered topics such as the sound system of the language, the alphabet, keyboard layout discussions, and keyboard testing.
The guiding principle throughout the workshops was community acceptance and leadership. It was crucial that these communities made the decisions about the keyboards while our team could provide technical advice when needed.
Between the days of each workshop the globalization team at Motorola worked with Professor Ambrocio and the community to develop multiple iterations of the keyboards according to the layouts they had devised during the workshop.
Decisions that were considered by our team and the community included how many rows the keyboard should have, how to include characters that are specific to Zapotec languages, and the layout of the entire keyboard including numbers, symbols and special characters.
Our team wanted the keyboards to be representative of the communities. Some of the communities requested images to be on the space bar. For example, the Teotitlan community requested a symbol of a cloud with a lightning going through it to appear on the space bar since it is symbolic of their community. As the first Zapotec keyboard on a smartphone this project has made it possible for these communities to write in Zapotec on their smartphones for the very first time.
In Oaxaca City we hosted a large workshop in which participants from all five communities were invited to discuss the project at large. Members of the different communities were able to see each other's work and discussions were had about the importance of language revitalization for the Zapotec community. Overall, community feedback was positive. People remarked the keyboard was important for the revitalization of the language as well as very practical for daily use.
And now I'll talk about one of our localization projects for the Ladin language. Ladin is categorized as definitely endangered, and is spoken by about 32,000 people in the Dolomite region of Italy. It's an autochthonous language meaning that it is native to the region. Since it is a minority language that does not have a kin state or an associated political entity supporting it, the impact of this project is powerful and highlights the importance of helping to promote minority languages.
While Ladin is taught in schools in some areas, there are not many protective measures for the language in other areas. In these areas Ladin is not used in administrative scenarios, nor in the media, nor at public events and nor in education. With the increase in globalization in the Dolomite region, it is important to ensure that a minority language such as Ladin is preserved. Thus our team collaborated with Professor Paul Videsott who is a Professor of Romance Philology at the Free University of Bozen‑Bolzano, as well as a team of Ladin translators to localize over 200,000 words that now appear in the User Interface of our smartphones when a user selects Ladin as the device language.
To make important decisions towards the digitization of the language, Professor Paul Videsott had several meetings among translators and representatives of three Ladin cultural institutes: Val Badia, Fassa, and Fodom.
In some cases and even in an entire domain of a language, Ladin had never been used before. For example, the terminology related to the use of different functions of the camera. One case was the term Bokeh affect and this was crafted by Ladin translators and linguists who created a word in Ladin which roughly translates to the equivalent of an effect with undefined contours.
Another difficult aspect of an initiative like this was the choice on which of the written dialects to use. There's essentially one Ladin dialect per Valle, but the team decided to use the variety of Val Badia which is the most widely spoken and used.
However, the team made a concerted effort to use words and forms that are as comprehensible as possible throughout the entire Ladin territory. Ladin speakers can now use their smartphones with a Ladin User Interface thus helping to highlight the importance of including endangered indigenous languages in this technology.
Professor Paul Videsott believes having Ladin in these mobile phones shows not only for the Ladins but to all users of smaller languages in the world that their language was not only useful for the 20 centuries before our time but will be useful also in the future. Definitively, this project will help Ladin and other minority languages to be more visible. Mobile phones are like the pencil of the 21st century. And having minority languages and having Ladin in them has the same importance of having a language in a book in the centuries before.
As leaders of technology, Lenovo Foundation and Motorola recognise our responsibility to positively influence society through environmental and social governance. We are committed to the international decade of indigenous languages from 2022 to 2032 and look toward community feedback to improve our process. We also value sharing our process with the public so that others can join the language revitalization and digitation causes.
Through this Digital Inclusion Initiative and the communities that we have collaborated, with we have translated and open sourced over one million words that are available at motorola.com so that they can be downloaded by educators, researchers, and industry experts aiming to promote the revitalization of endangered indigenous and minority languages.
With the core tenace of passionate employee experts, a commitment to respect for diverse and underrepresented cultures, commitment to quality through collaboration of scholars and institutions, and a vision for an impact broader than Motorola devices, the Digital Inclusion of Indigenous Languages Initiative will continue.
We will now take questions for our Q&A session.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: We'll now take questions at the microphones at the sides of the room. Thank you.
>> OSEI KAGYAH: Hello, everyone. Good morning. I hope I'm audible enough.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Hello. We hear you good.
>> OSEI KAGYAH: My name is Osei Kagyah. I'm from Ghana. And very excited to be part of this conversation. I'm also the rep for West Africa Youth IGF coordinator.
This particular topic is of very great interest because in my country Ghana there are two dialects which are ‑‑ only one dialect which two people only speak is going to stand by a report last year and I didn't see much of work being done in Africa and maybe more on that will help.
Beyond interface translation I would like to know how Motorola intends to address the challenges when it comes to ensuring that digitized languages evolve and remain culturally relevant and also about co‑creation of local communities. If you can just provide clarity on that, I'm very grateful. Thank you, very much.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Thank you. Would you like to take that one?
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: I can take that one, sure.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: You take the first part.
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: Sure. So as you know we have done localization and keyboard projects. And if I understand your question correctly, it's how can we expand beyond that, beyond the digitalization to really impact communities.
And what I can say on that is when we look to initiate new phases of the project, we make sure that we work very closely with the community to ensure that something like localization or keyboard creation is part of their needs.
As I mentioned before, community acceptance and feedback is one of our primary parameters for when we decide to include and work with a community into our phones.
And so when it comes to other sorts of initiatives that expand beyond localization and keyboard projects, we really want to collaborate with the community to ensure that, you know, another sort of project fits that. So it really is a case by case basis depending on what the community wants and how they feel that their language can best be preserved and represented.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Thank you, Delaney. And so just to reinform that, when we partner with organisations in the regions that the language are developed, then we are pooling resources also into their own, let's say ecosystem. So at the same time we are kind of revitalizing the community around the language.
Do we have any other questions? Yes, please.
>> YAO SOSSOU: Can you hear me?
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Yes.
>> YAO SOSSOU: Okay. Hello, everybody. My name is Yao Sossou. I'm from Benin. I represent the Youth IGF Benin. Thank you for your presentation. I was a bit late so I didn't follow all the slides you presented.
I want to understand how do you actually select the language you work on?
And also the second question is: At the current stage of the process you've developed, how we can replicate it into other regions like Africa. You know, mostly we are one tiny countries with 60 different dialects that we want to revitalize in. So since we are also looking to how to include everybody into the Digital Inclusion sphere, so how we can replicate what you already developed in those contexts? Thank you, very much.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Thank you.
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: I can take this question. I have put back onto the slides our parameters for language selection and so these parameters include various things such as the official UNESCO endangerment status of the language.
So we work with languages that are endangered. So this can include the vulnerable, slash, endangered category; the definitely endangered category; severely endangered; and critically endangered categories.
We also assess whether the language has been supported by Unicode for example or Gboard, or a CLDR. So we look at all of these technical aspects of Digital Inclusion to see where the language falls in that.
And then as I mentioned before, community input and feeling regarding the digitization. So as Motorola and Lenovo Foundation we want to ensure that the community is respectfully involved from the beginning to the end of the process. So we work with a community to figure out what sort of digitization process will best suit their language preservation needs.
And then finally the availability of subject matter experts to guide the project in the direction that the community wants. So these can be community leaders, these can be professors or scholars, basically anyone who can help us bridge that gap between us to the community to ensure that everyone is ‑‑ can respectfully communicate their needs with one another.
And then I'll pass it over to my colleague, Juliana Rebelatto, who is here over Zoom to answer the second part of the question which is how something like this project can be replicated or how other communities can go through this process.
>> JULIANA REBELATTO: Thank you so much, Delaney. Can you hear me all right?
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: Yes, we can hear you.
>> JULIANA REBELATTO: Okay. Well, thank you for your question. I'm sorry to hear about the language of your community that only has two speakers. We understand the importance of those actions. And I would say that there are a couple of ways that one community could replicate the work that we are doing. I'll give an example of what is happening with the Kaingang community in the south of Brazil. They are using our smartphones to bring the technology and the language into classrooms. So of course that is an extension of what we are doing.
The actual replication I would say to the second example would be based on the language Ladin in Italy that we supported there have been continuity studies that researchers use our corpus, the data, the data set, the language set that we made available on the Motorola.com web page and they're working on building machine translation models for their communities to be able to further use the language, for example.
I would say that for language such as the ones that have not been part of our programme yet, one thing that could be possible to be done is for us to initiate a conversation because like Delaney mentioned earlier we are always looking at how else we can contribute to communities so we will be happy to share our e‑mail addresses. And hearing out what the community's needs are helps us define the next steps of our journey.
Motorola and Lenovo Foundation are fully committed to Digital Inclusion. Lenovo's mission is "Smarter Technology for All" so we take real respect on any type of needs that the community has. Of course we cannot make promises but we can of course be committed to listening to your needs and understanding how else we could be collaborating with the language.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Thank you, very much, Juliana. Do we have any other questions in the audience or do we have any questions online?
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: No questions online.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Anyone else?
>> DHARAM GOKHOOL: Good morning.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Good morning.
>> DHARAM GOKHOOL: Myself, the President of the Republic of Mauritius. I travel a long distance to come to this conference. I must congratulate the speaker and other speakers because it has to do with cultural heritage. And find it very interesting that Motorola is partnering with UNESCO for the preservation of indigenous languages.
I have a very simple question that is in terms of, you know, requests that are channelled to UNESCO and the Motorola Foundation, could NGOs also forward requests based on the criteria that you have mentioned or should it be channelled officially by governments?
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: Juliana, would you like to take that question?
>> JULIANA REBELATTO: I can, yes, thank you. Nice meeting you virtually. So yes, I'll be happy to share my e‑mail address in chat. And you're welcome to share requests. We are opened to listening to what the communities' needs are. It does not need to come through government official requests. We have been partnering up with professors from universities, from local universities as well as nonprofit organizations. And this is normally the model of work we do. We partner up with nonprofit organisations to make payments to the translators that are going to be working with us and to the researchers that are going to be onboarded in our initiative phase.
We want to make sure everyone works in the initiative. It's really the same way as any translator or linguist of any other widely spoken languages. That's why it is important that we also have the nonprofit organisation. But, yes, short answer is we will be happy to hear what your requests would be. We'll be glad to assess the feasibilities of that.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Just to summarize, it doesn't have to be an NGO. It's mostly about the subject matter expert for the specific language and how they can help us to build the programme.
So we can share later our contacts and we can actually follow‑up. Okay. Thank you, very much.
Do we have something online?
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: Just a request to share e‑mail addresses.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Oh. Any other comments? Maybe, Juliana, would you like to add something?
>> JULIANA REBELATTO: Yeah. I think one piece of information that is always helpful here is one curiosity that normally comes to us, a question is how this programme initiated and what motivated Motorola and Lenovo Foundation to look into languages that are normally not seen in technology.
And I would say that the reason that the three of you are there speaking and the reason that we are doing the work since 2019 when we initiated the research is precisely the gap that we have identified. We identified that endangered indigenous languages are not fully well‑represented and certainly not represented well enough in technology.
And we hope this speech and this initiative that we have been delivering to the globe will inspire others, will inspire other companies, other groups, to look into minority languages and to, you know, talk to the community and hear out what they have to say, what is important for them. We truly believe that most steps like the creation of a keyboard can change lives and we hope this will trigger others to follow our path.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: And just a little bit, like, would you mind to share any roadmap? We don't have to formalize. But is there anything we can share with the audience about future languages because there's still a few years to come.
>> JULIANA REBELATTO: Yes. We normally do not fully cover stiff roadmap. Like, I answered two questions before, we are always looking out to the current community needs and the actual goals that we have are aligned with the community needs first and most important of all.
What I can say, Santi, is that we have been at UNESCO's kickoff event for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, and that was in 2022. The decade is from 2022 to 2032.
So although there's no defined cadence for us to announce new languages, we are fully dedicated to the UNESCO decade, and we're gonna be constantly looking at what else could be done, what other languages in the globe could be part of our initiative so that we announce them and we work closely with expert matters ‑‑ subject or expert matters, the community, translators, professors, leaders of the community and government parties to make sure that we are onboarding more.
So there's no predefined roadmap but there's certainly one that we are very excited to keep on working on. And we are committed up until the end of the UNESCO International Indigenous Languages.
>> SANTIAGO MENDEZ: Thank you, Juliana. I think then we are good to go.
Any last questions for the audience before we finish?
Then, on behalf of Motorola and Lenovo Foundation, we thank you for taking your time to listen to us and wish you a very nice day.
>> DELANEY GOMEZ‑JACKSON: Thank you, everyone.
>> GIANLUCA DIANA: Thank you.
>> JULIANA REBELATTO: Thank you.
(Applause).