A 12-year-old taught his robot an endangered Native language

Holden Hoy, 12, spent this spring teaching a small robot to speak Anishinaabemowin, an endangered Native American language with fewer than 10,000 speakers in the U.S. The rising seventh grader from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, built his SkoBot with mentor Danielle Boyer, who founded a nonprofit at 18 to help Native children construct their own. The palm-sized robots mount on the shoulder and answer questions using prerecorded audio, so they never invent words. Hoy named his Sabe, meaning Bigfoot, who represents honesty in Ojibwe culture. He programmed it to introduce itself at his school science fair, where it also reassured the crowd: "I will not gain sentience and take over the world. Or will I?" Boyer's grandmother is one of the last fluent speakers of their dialect. "You lose your culture, you lose a way to describe who you are," she said. Hoy's mother, Jocelyn, said her son has started teaching her.