Google Maps gets better at pronouncing Māori placenames after years of complaints

Google Maps gets better at pronouncing Māori placenames after years of complaints After English, te reo Māori remains country’s second most widely spoken language - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments Google has launched a new voice for Maps in New Zealand that can correctly pronounce te reo Māori place names, after years of criticism over the navigation app’s mispronunciation of Indigenous names of cities and towns. The new AI-powered text-to-speech model, which began rolling out on Thursday, speaks English with a New Zealand accent while accurately pronouncing Māori names. The update was developed in partnership with Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, New Zealand’s Māori language commission, using pronunciation rules guided by the commission alongside publicly available data from the New Zealand Geographic Board – the authority over geographical and hydrographic names within the country and its territorial waters. The update is being rolled out globally across Android, iOS, Android Auto, and CarPlay, and users can access it by setting their device language to English (New Zealand), Google said in an announcement. Caroline Rainsford, Google’s country director in New Zealand, said “advancements in AI” had enabled the company’s text-to-speech model to pronounce te reo Māori placenames within English sentences, adding that the update would not have been possible without Google’s “years-long partnership and deep collaboration” with Te Taura Whiri. She added: “We’re so proud to be able to launch this voice in New Zealand because we know how important it is to pronounce our local place names correctly.” For many Māori speakers, the update addresses a longstanding complaint: that Google Maps has for years struggled to pronounce place names like Whangārei and Taranaki, often reducing Māori sounds to awkward English approximations. Ngahiwi Apanui-Barr, chief executive of Te Taura Whiri, said correct pronunciation was essential not only for navigation but for preserving linguistic and cultural meaning. “It just spoke directly to my heart, to hear my language being pronounced properly on an app. This is the future of my language, 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.,” he told The Guardian. Te reo Māori has undergone a marked resurgence in recent years, despite ongoing political tensions over its use in public life. According to Stats NZ’s 2023 census, 887,493 people, or 17.8 per cent of New Zealand’s population, identified as Māori, while te reo Māori remains the country’s second most widely spoken language after English. Census data also showed a 15 per cent increase in the number of Māori speakers between 2018 and 2023. Google’s update comes nearly a decade after concerns over its pronunciation of Māori placenames first prompted a public correction effort. In 2017, the company launched the “Say It Tika” campaign with One New Zealand and Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, receiving more than 60,000 user-submitted corrections. The corrections did not lead to immediate changes, however, and criticism of Google’s handling of te reo Māori persisted. In an interview with RNZ in October 2024, Peter-Lucas Jones, chief executive of Māori language technology company Te Hiku Media, said global AI companies were still lagging on Māori pronunciation and argued their benchmarks for accuracy were too low. “When we look at Open AI tools and Google tools, while they are making big advances, it’s clear there are no proficient Māori language speakers involved, because if there were, they wouldn’t release tools with such bad pronunciation,” Mr Jones told the outlet. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments [Image text:] Meal Google Maps