The giant leaps in language technology -- and who's left behind

Main Points: 

1. In the world, there are thousands of languages, but current speech technology supports only a small fraction of these languages, leaving many countries and people left behind in digital exclusion.
2. When a language is left out from the digital landscape, the people who speak this language miss out on the benefits of technology, which can widen the social and economic gaps.
3. People are working to create digital systems that can remove the language barriers, ensuring that technology works like a helpful bridge rather than a barrier.
4. NLP and speech technologies needs large amounts of data, however this is often unachievable for low-resource and poverty stricken languages, which is not helpful for their development.
5. Microsoft's Project Ellora want to bring and connect the gaps of language technology by creating data, techniques, and applications for lo-resource languages.
6. Collaborations with local communities are helpful in developing different and new language technologies while maintaining their sustainability.
7. Karya is the name of a project that focuses on the collection of data through digital microtasks to deprived communities. This allows them to contribute to and benefit from these language technology developments.
8. Bali has a vision of the future in which the inclusively of technology supports linguistic diversity, allowing all the languages from different communities to stay and keep up with new technological advancements.