Machine learning has revolutionised speech technologies for major world languages, but these technologies have generally not been available for the roughly 4,000 languages with populations of fewer than 10,000 speakers. This paper describes the development of Elpis, a pipeline which language documentation workers with minimal computational experience can use to build their own speech recognition models, resulting in models being built for 16 languages from the Asia-Pacific region. Elpis puts machine learning speech technologies within reach of people working with languages with scarce data, in a scalable way. This is impactful since it enables language communities to cross the digital divide, and speeds up language documentation. Complete automation of the process is not feasible for languages with small quantities of data and potentially large vocabularies. Hence our goal is not full automation, but rather to make a practical and effective workflow that integrates machine learning technologies.

‘Low’ and ‘high’ varieties of Indonesian and other languages of Indonesia are poorly resourced for developing human language technologies. Many languages spoken in Indonesia, even those with very large speaker populations, such as Javanese (over 80 million), are thought to be threatened languages. The teaching of Indonesian language focuses on the prestige variety which forms part of the unusual diglossia found in many parts of Indonesia. We developed a publicly available pipeline to scrape and clean text from the PDFs of a classic Indonesian textbook, The Indonesian Way, creating a corpus. Using the corpus and curated wordlists from a number of lexicons I searched for instances of non-prestige varieties of Indonesian, finding that they play a limited, secondary role to formal Indonesian in this textbook. References to other languages used in Indonesia are usually made as a passing comment. These methods help to determine how text teaching resources relate to and influence the language politics of diglossia and the many languages of Indonesia.