Mandarin is replacing Cantonese. Offbeat AI fights back as Big Tech looks away

Preserving Cantonese has been challenging due to the dominance of Mandarin, limited learning resources and a lack of a standard written form. With a declining number of young learners, the language faces an uncertain future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) – seen by some as an existential threat to humanity – may become the hope for saving the language, and many others, along with the distinct cultures they embody.

This is the mission of Hong Kong-based deep-tech company Votee AI: to use large language models (LLMs) to preserve languages, especially those overlooked by tech giants.

Leo Ma, Votee’s chief scientist for the Asia-Pacific, said in an interview that AI could create living records of many languages beyond English – the primary language for most LLMs today.

“While mainstream AI models excel in English, they remain ‘functionally illiterate’ for 99 per cent of the world’s languages,” Ma said, adding that this limited AI access for the billions of non-English speakers.

Unlike Mandarin, English or Spanish, which have vast troves of digital text for AI training, Cantonese lacks written text that accurately reflects how it is spoken.