According to UNESCO, 98 indigenous languages in Russia will disappear in the next 50 years.

Most of them will leave no written literature behind. We created an AI that has learned the disappearing languages and can teach them back to people.

The endangered languages of Russian tribes are extremely low resource languages. They are also low-density languages, i.e. they are spoken by very few people, often less than a hundred speakers.

These languages are spoken but not written, it means they will leave no literature behind. There's very little linguistic material suitable for data analysis: linguistic expeditions were rare and decades apart, the grammar descriptions are scarce and often insufficient.

We created an AI that has learned disappearing languages and can teach them back to people.

This project took over two years in the making. We went to remote villages of Russia and recorded hundreds of hours of natives talking. A specially built AI analyzed this linguistic material to reveal the general patterns and logic of the language. Learning algorithms expanded the lexicon based on statistical translation approach. Once the correspondence system between Russian and the endangered language was created, the language was fully preserved within the AI and could be learned by anyone who speaks Russian in the future. That’s how Immortals appeared.

On the 4th of November 2019, National Unity Day, Russia met the Immortals.

We went to remote villages of Russia and recorded hundreds of hours of natives talking. A specially built AI analyzed this linguistic material to reveal the general patterns and logic of the language. Learning algorithms expanded the lexicon based on statistical translation approach. Once the correspondence system between Russian and the endangered language was created, the language was fully preserved within the AI and could be learned by anyone who speaks Russian in the future. This is how the Immortals appeared

Russian people interacted with the Immortals via voice and print input online.

Paid media has reached 35 million people. Social media, press, TV shows and news added 70 million people. The country kept talking about the disappearing languages for 9 weeks. Further funding was secured for several years to come.

The AI can be now used to save all 98 endangered languages. Rare specialised linguists have reached out to help teach the Immortals other disappearing languages. There’re hundreds of disappearing languages around the world. This AI can be used to preserve all of them.