Designing Speech Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, Risks and Participation

TL;DR

This paper examines how speech technologies can be designed to support Australian Aboriginal English, a contemporary Indigenous contact variety, by balancing practical opportunities with deployment and research risks. It presents a case study of a Google–University of Western Australia collaboration, emphasizing participatory design, Indigenous governance, and culturally safe data practices to develop ASR while mitigating possible harms. The work contributes methodological guidance for building inclusive, community-centered NLP research and argues for extending such approaches to other minoritised language varieties and contexts. Its implications span improved civil and economic participation for Indigenous communities, enhanced data sovereignty, and a blueprint for ethically responsible technology development in multilingual, culturally diverse settings.

Abstract

In Australia, post-contact language varieties, including creoles and local varieties of international languages, emerged as a result of forced contact between Indigenous communities and English speakers. These contact varieties are widely used, yet are poorly supported by language technologies. This gap presents barriers to participation in civil and economic society for Indigenous communities using these varieties, and reproduces minoritisation of contemporary Indigenous sociolinguistic identities. This paper concerns three questions regarding this context. First, can speech technologies support speakers of Australian Aboriginal English, a local indigenised variety of English? Second, what risks are inherent in such a project? Third, what technology development practices are appropriate for this context, and how can researchers integrate meaningful community participation in order to mitigate risks? We argue that opportunities do exist -- as well as risks -- and demonstrate this through a case study exploring design practices in a real-world project aiming to improve speech technologies for Australian Aboriginal English. We discuss how we integrated culturally appropriate and participatory processes throughout the project. We call for increased support for languages used by Indigenous communities, including contact varieties, which provide practical economic and socio-cultural benefits, provided that participatory and culturally safe practices are enacted.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Visual prompts for speech data elicitation.