She turned down $65M for her AI, gives away robots to save an endangered language
danielleboyerr · x · 2026-09-21
Danielle Boyer (TIME100 AI 2026), an Anishinaabe engineer, built SkoBot — shoulder-worn robots teaching Anishinaabemowin, a language nearly erased by residential schools with fewer than 1,000 fluent U.S. speakers.
Key facts:
- A major tech company offered her organization $65 million for the AI and thousands of recordings behind it; after consulting her community she declined and kept giving robots away free.
- The AI is narrow by design: a speech recognition model she trained from scratch, running locally on a paired phone, no cloud servers, no LLM — it plays recordings from fluent elders and community linguists after a trigger word.
- In 2025 a popular chatbot invented a fake Anishinaabemowin word; she argues Indigenous communities need self-determination in tech, not tools built for them.
- Since 2021 she has placed 350 robots in Tribal schools and Indigenous youth programs, reaching over 10,000 children; National Geographic Society support carried the org through a year of funding cuts, and she is incorporating as SkoBot Systems so tribes can own it.
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