This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), software for implementing text prediction and read-along audiobooks for Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects.

Plains Cree is a less-resourced language in Canada. To promote its usage online, we describe previous keyboard layouts for typing Plains Cree syllabics on smartphones. We describe our own solution whose development was guided by ergonomics research and corpus statistics. We then describe a case study in which three participants used a previous layout and our own, and we collected quantitative and qualitative data. We conclude that, despite observing accuracy improvements in user testing, introducing a brand new paradigm for typing Plains Cree syllabics may not be ideal for the community.