Like many of the young people in her Indigenous Anishinaabe community in the upper peninsula of Michigan, Danielle Boyer grew up speaking only a little of her people’s native language, Anishinaabemowin.

“In our community, generational language loss is very rapid,” she told CNN. “A lot of our grandparents speak it and then our parents speak a little bit of it and then we speak even less of it.”

But Boyer, 24, is now seeking to reverse that trend with her language teaching robot, the SkoBot. Inspired by a talking Elmo toy, SkoBot is designed to be an interactive way for children to learn Anishinaabemowin.

Boyer’s project is part of a growing push to preserve and revitalize endangered languages with the help of robotics and artificial intelligence, often led by young people looking to

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