The idea came to Danielle Boyer in a toy store, in front of a Tickle Me Elmo. Press the belly and the toy talks, and teaches. "There are toys that teach us in English," she told NPR, "but there aren't toys that teach us Anishinaabemowin. And I wanted that to be different." Anishinaabemowin, which spans the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe languages, has fewer than 10,000 speakers left in the United States. Boyer's own grandmother is among the last fluent speakers of their dialect. So Boyer, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, built a robot.
She calls it the SkoBot: a small, customisable machine that mounts on a child's shoulder and looks like a woodland creature decorated in Native florals, a little like a friendly R2-D2. Ask it a word and it answers. "What is bear?" draws back "makwa, makwa." Through a nonprofit Boyer started at 18, she has now mentored hundreds of Native children, teaching them to build SkoBots of their own. Now 25, she has turned language preservation into a hands-on engineering class.
One of her students is 12-year-old Holden Hoy, a rising seventh grader in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He named his robot Sabe, the Anishinaabemowin word for Bigfoot, who in Ojibwe culture represents honesty. Hoy programmed Sabe to introduce itself at his school science fair, with a line that captures the whole project's humour and unease at once: "I was built by Holden Hoy. I will not gain sentience and take over the world. Or will I?"
The most interesting engineering decision is what the SkoBot deliberately does not do. It uses no generative AI at all. A single sensor listens for a trigger word, and the robot plays back a prerecorded audio file made by a real speaker. "There isn't synthetic speech, there isn't any generative AI," Boyer explained. "It's simply listening to what you're saying, identifying it and playing files that already exist." That design choice has a purpose: the SkoBot can never hallucinate. It will never invent a word.
That matters more than it might sound. As chatbots have spread, some people have turned to them to learn Indigenous languages, and Boyer says she has watched large language models like ChatGPT fabricate words in Anishinaabemowin that do not exist. For a language with only thousands of speakers, a confident falsehood is not a harmless glitch; it is a corruption of a fragile record. "If we're not learning our language correctly," she said, "we shouldn't learn it at all." Hoy, at 12, has already absorbed the lesson: "AI tends to falsify things a lot."
There is a quiet argument buried in a child's shoulder robot. Boyer worries that AI built without Indigenous people "stands to do a lot of harm," that feeding sacred knowledge into models hands it to companies with no stake in the community. Her answer is not to reject the technology but to bound it, to build a machine that only ever repeats what a trusted human has already said. In a week thick with talk of singularities and billion-dollar humanoids, the SkoBot is a reminder that the most respectful use of AI can be the one that refuses to guess. As Hoy put it, plainly: "The language is the culture."