Using AI (artificial intelligence) to preserve Wallloon?

The first question some may have is why? Anything like the development; of the internet for example, that can create an easier way for people to learn something is beneficial. It may get to the point in Belgium (and I hope it doesn't, but it plays to plan ahead), where the number of Walloon speakers are far apart. This makes the ability for the potential remaining minority to learn from, difficult. Such is the case here already in Wisconsin.

ASR (automatic speech recognition) such as the technology in Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant, is the process of interpreting spoken words into written words. There are privacy conerns to some on a device with an open microphone. However being able to keep fluent with a such a virtual assistant, my asking what todays weather forecast is, and the latest sports scores can be beneficial. More-so when there are less oportunities to interact human to human.

Lucyin Mahin has had a clear vision that a common way to write in Walloon needs to be established. From what I gather its acceptance/use has been mixed. But even for the language to survive in a oral form, at the academic level there must be a standard written version. This day in the digital world, that is paramount.

I've been reading up on organizations behind linguistic policy. Its amazing to me that I never really thought about how American English words are put into dictionaries, etc. But American English is a bit weird in that reguard. Most languages have a country endorsement, and /or formal group behind the languages policy.

I recommend the formation of a organization representing Walloon. Something like how we created the Belgian Heritage Center organization. An entity with officers who can toot their horn, write letters and advocate for a synthetic model of standardized Walloon. This organization could act as a decision maker in terms of walloon spelling for the community.

Belgium has an impressive (to me anyway) collective group linguistics, media/content creators trying to save a language.. So I am thinking some bigger cental organzation to work with all the smaller groups? Since the rifondou isn't catching on, and that seems to be a key thing to its survival... I'd say the Walloons should identify who would benefit the most from a standard spelling... It seems to me anyone trying to publish books would be the first people I'd approach for donations to try and fund the organzation.

Then if the Walloons are interested in a modern syntheic model, the question is how get the big tech players to pay attention to basically a minority language?

When I see the reports of AI developers working to save Icelandic and other languages, I am not sure if there is money exchanged or if there is just a marketing incentive.

Once you have a organization formed then you can advertise or reach out to the AI companies. And if you think having the Belgian Heritage Center co-sign such a request will help, please let us know, as we gladly will.

As its sits Google's Bard, and OpenAI's chat-gpt are likely the most promising technolgy right now. While they do claim to self learn, my experence has been they also forget. I think for this to really be able to translate written Walloon well, it will take developer input to feed it training data.

I asked Bard if there was anyone of Belgian heritage working at google. "Bart De Smet is a Senior Software Engineer at Google AI. He is originally from Belgium and has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Leuven." So that is a plus! (However this conflicts with his Linked In profile which says he works at Microsoft)