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For years, Māori placenames have been distorted into nearly unrecognisable sounds by Google Maps in New Zealand. For those with attuned ears, it can be grating or offensive.

Now the Māori language commission – Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori – has collaborated with Google to fix it, launching a New Zealand-accented voice for its navigation tool that can correctly pronounce Māori words. It is the culmination of a project that has been years in the making.

“We can’t underestimate just how important this is in terms of normalising te reo Māori [Māori language],” Ngahiwi Apanui-Barr, the commission’s chief executive, told the Guardian.

“When everybody who is learning te reo Māori, or who speaks the language, hears those placenames being used, their language journey is being supported.”

While the government is pushing policies to limit the language in the public service, te reo Māori has undergone a major resurgence in the past decade. There are extensive waiting lists for classes, Māori songs often top the charts and Hollywood studios are releasing versions of movies in Māori.

Māori is the second most widely spoken language in New Zealand, after English, according to the 2023 census. Between 2018 and 2023, there was a 15% increase in the number of Māori speakers.

Apanui-Barr said he “giggled with glee” when he listened to the placenames being pronounced properly.

“It just spoke directly to my heart, to hear my language being pronounced properly on an app … this is the future of my language, is one of the foundations we need to have in place, because if people hear the language being pronounced properly, they are going to say it properly too.”

The project was an example of how a public organisation can work with a private sector company to do a “really good job”, Apanui-Barr said.

The Google project has prioritised cities, towns and certain street names for its launch, with the goal of expanding into more roads and regions.

In 2017, Google and telecommunications company Vodafone (now One NZ) launched a campaign, with support from the language commission, calling on the public to pinpoint which Māori names were being mispronounced. Google said it would correct the tool by the end of that year.

More than 60,000 corrections were submitted but technological hurdles led to delays.

Advancements in AI text-to-speech models have now enabled the project to get off the ground, said Caroline Rainsford from Google New Zealand.

The model is not bilingual – it is English – but draws on the data of sounds and names, guided by the commission and publicly available New Zealand Geographic Board data. A voice actor was hired to record a large script of te reo Māori sounds, which then feeds the model. The commission retains guardianship of that data, to ensure Māori academics, researchers and communities can access the lexicon.

A number of other countries are on the waitlist for voice capture of their Indigenous languages, and projects are under way in Australia and the US.

Rainsford said technology plays an important role in the use and advancement of te reo Māori, and she was proud New Zealanders would now hear “a Kiwi voice” during navigation.

“And [they] are going to be able to hear really incredible pronunciation of our very sacred placenames in New Zealand.”