AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Revitalizing Indigenous Language with AI: KIWA Digital + Caitlyn on AWS
By: Julie Ryan, CEO – Custom D
By: Tim Ackroyd, Product Manager, Caitlyn – Custom D
By: Kristine Frances Baldas, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By: Heena Khan, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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| Custom D |
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A GenAI Approach to Revitalizing Indigenous Language for the Digital Age
Certain Indigenous languages, like Ngalia, are endangered — spoken today by only a handful of remaining elders. Others, like te reo Māori, still have thousands of speakers but face challenges with intergenerational transfer and digital accessibility. Globally, more than 40% of the world’s 7,000 languages are at risk of disappearing, with one Indigenous language lost every two weeks (UNESCO, United Nations).
Kiwa Digital, a New Zealand–based Indigenous software company, partnered with Custom D, an AWS ISV Partner, to embed Caitlyn, a generative AI platform built on Amazon Bedrock, into its flagship product CultureQ. In this blog, we’ll explore how this modern GenAI solution helps Indigenous communities connect generations through conversation and preserve language with cultural integrity. We’ll also see how Custom D’s Caitlyn platform, powered by AWS, provides a secure and scalable way to support Indigenous knowledge for the digital age.
The Challenge: Preserving Language in the Digital Age
The rapid shift from oral storytelling and written traditions to digital communication has disrupted how knowledge is shared across generations. Younger speakers now engage primarily through smartphones and social platforms, leaving fewer opportunities for immersive, face-to-face learning within their communities. This social transformation has weakened the natural channels through which endangered languages once thrived.
Compounding this challenge is the fact that many Indigenous languages are multimedia-rich, deeply contextual, and reliant on cultural nuance – qualities that don’t translate easily into mainstream digital systems. Imagine asking, “How were bush plants used for traditional medicines?” within the Ngalia people’s body of knowledge. Most search engines or AI chatbots cannot interpret such a question within its proper cultural frame, let alone return a response that is accurate, trustworthy, and culturally appropriate. General-purpose AI models, designed for broad linguistic patterns, often misrepresent or simplify Indigenous knowledge, inadvertently eroding its authenticity.
The dominance of global online platforms and translation tools further marginalizes local languages, prioritizing widely spoken tongues and mainstream narratives. Together, these forces have created deep gaps in intergenerational language transmission. As a result, using digital tools to keep Indigenous languages alive is no longer optional — it is essential for their survival and continued vitality in the digital age.
Solution: GenAI based CultureQ platform
To address the challenge of preserving Indigenous languages and cultural knowledge, Kiwa Digital, in partnership with Custom D, created Culture Q – a conversational platform that enables communities to capture, store and actively engage with their cultural resources.
Unlike static digital archives, CultureQ transforms cultural materials into interactive, multimedia learning experiences. Users can engage through voice or text by asking conversational questions, and even swipe across text to hear the language spoken aloud — turning cultural archives into living, dialogue-based experiences. As shown in Figure 1, users can ask natural-language questions such as “How were bush plants used for traditional medicines?” and receive curated responses that draw from community-approved resources, including recorded stories, language examples, and historical artifacts. This allows people of all generations to explore cultural knowledge in ways that mirror oral storytelling traditions while remaining digitally accessible.
Built on Custom D’s Caitlyn platform, CultureQ combines GenAI with cultural governance to ensure every response is accurate, respectful, and traceable to its original source. The platform has already indexed thousands of artifacts — including over 1,000 digitized audio, text, and visual resources – allowing users to explore them confidently, knowing the authenticity and cultural integrity of each item is maintained.
Figure 1: CultureQ connects generations through digital conversation
How CultureQ powered by Caitlyn Works
The CultureQ solution is built on Custom D’s Caitlyn platform, a generative-AI system that transforms unstructured cultural data into structured, searchable knowledge. Caitlyn orchestrates Amazon Bedrock foundation models, currently using Anthropic’s Claude 4 Sonnet, while retaining the flexibility to integrate newer models as they become available. This design enables continuous improvements in accuracy, performance, security, and cost-efficiency.
Within CultureQ, Caitlyn’s adaptive reasoning layer interprets natural language questions, maps them to approved cultural materials, and generates traceable, context-aware responses. This proprietary framework, developed by Custom D, connects user intent with verified Indigenous knowledge while maintaining cultural integrity.
Intelligent document-processing pipelines, powered by AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions, manage the ingestion, enrichment, and indexing of text, audio, and visual artefacts. Data is encrypted and stored in Amazon S3, indexed through Amazon OpenSearch Service, and linked via Neo4j to maintain relationships across language, people, and place. Security is reinforced through AWS WAF, Amazon CloudFront, optional AWS Shield, and IAM-based access control with AWS Secrets Manager. System monitoring is achieved through Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alerts, complemented by AWS Security Hub and CloudTrail for compliance and audit visibility.
Architecture Highlights
- Deep Cultural Context – CultureQ uses Caitlyn’s agentic context engine, which models connections between ideas, people, places, and language concepts to deliver responses that are culturally aligned and contextually rich. This approach goes beyond conventional retrieval pipelines by interpreting meaning within Indigenous lens.
- Metadata & Knowledge Curation – CultureQ leverages Caitlyn’s ability to automatically enrich documents with structured metadata (speaker, language, dialect, geography, cultural context, and rights/consent). This ensures every response is fully traceable to source, preserves historical meaning, and supports long-term language revitalisation.
- Data Processing Layer – Amazon S3 provides encrypted, durable storage; Amazon OpenSearch Service enables semantic and keyword search; Neo4j manages knowledge relationships; and Amazon SageMaker supports model evaluation and future training tasks within a machine learning environment.
- Enterprise-grade security – A multi-layered security model combines encryption, IAM least-privilege policies, CI/CD vulnerability scanning, and optional dedicated account structures for customers requiring in-region deployments. Authentication uses OIDC-based single sign-on (SSO) with role-based access control (RBAC). Data sovereignty is maintained through regional AWS deployments, ensuring community control of knowledge and access.
- Observability Stack – CultureQ tracks system performance through scheduled Amazon CloudWatch metrics allowing developers to analyse trends, refine ingestion quality, and improve model alignment over time.
To date, CultureQ has ingested and indexed more than 1,000 digitized cultural artifacts, maintaining bidirectional traceability between each source material and its derived insights through metadata linking and knowledge base management. By automating context discovery and enrichment, the system reduces manual curation effort and improves search relevance and retrieval speed, helping preserve the cultural relationships and historical meaning embedded within the data.
Figure 2: CultureQ Architecture Diagram
Cultural Integrity as a Design Principle
Because endangered language preservation is not only a technical challenge but also an ethical one, Kiwa Digital and Custom D designed CultureQ with cultural integrity in mind. The AWS Māori Data Lens, developed with Māori community leaders, guided key decisions around data collection, storage, and sharing. Principles such as Kaitiakitanga (guardianship), Manaakitanga (care), and Rangatiratanga (self-determination) shaped how CultureQ manages cultural knowledge — ensuring sovereignty, privacy, and community control.
Caitlyn is positioned as a digital kaitiaki (guardian), surfacing only approved knowledge, with safeguards protecting Indigenous perspectives — all underpinned by AWS Well-Architected best practices.
Caitlyn acts as a digital kaitiaki (guardian), surfacing only approved knowledge while protecting Indigenous perspectives. This is achieved through specific security controls like access management, data encryption, and compliance monitoring — following AWS best practices for secure, reliable, and efficient cloud architecture.
Real-world Impact & Results
In partnership with the Ngalia Aboriginal Corporation, CultureQ now captures stories from the three remaining fluent speakers of the Ngalia language. Learners can interact with these stories in real time through Caitlyn-powered conversation, preserving both language and meaning.
One early use case, the Dreamtime Mamutjitji Story, teaches cultural and scientific insights through a bilingual, interactive experience for children.
“Until now, Indigenous people had limited ways to preserve language and culture, with many unwilling or unaware of how to leverage technology to help. Using generative AI integrated into CultureQ, users can now have conversations and interact with their cultural data in a secure, managed environment, when previously they were only able to access static content.”
— Steven Renata, Managing Board Director, Kiwa Digital
The CultureQ platform helped Kiwa Digital secure the Te Ao Māori & Pasifika AI Award for its innovative approach to supporting Indigenous languages across Aotearoa and Pacific communities.
Measurable Outcomes:
- 96%+ response accuracy validated through human expert review of generated outputs across text, audio, and visual content
- 90% less manual work compared to traditional curation methods
- Fully cited, verifiable outputs with traceable source attribution
- Rapid deployment with secure, serverless orchestration
- Active or pilot projects in six Indigenous communities, with expansion planned to 21 by 2026
Conclusion: AI with Integrity
CultureQ shows that generative AI can preserve accuracy, cultural integrity, and privacy – empowering Indigenous communities to protect and share their language and identity on their own terms.
For ISVs and builders, this collaboration offers a practical blueprint for building responsible AI solutions:
- Deploy secure, scalable GenAI infrastructure with AWS services like Amazon Bedrock.
- Embed AI that adapts to your domain while respecting your data and governance requirements.
- Build features that combine code with cultural knowledge, maintaining clear documentation of sources and decisions
This architecture gives organizations a framework that balances scalability, sovereignty, and responsibility, positioning them to deliver AI solutions that earn user trust. AWS Marketplace simplifies deploying this recommended architecture through pre-configured, customizable solutions that accelerate time-to-value while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to your specific requirements. Explore ready-to-deploy solutions on AWS Marketplace, visit Caitlyn.ai to learn more, or contact your AWS account team to discuss implementing culturally aligned AI solutions tailored to your organization.
About Kiwa Digital
Kiwa Digital is a New Zealand-based Indigenous technology company pioneering cultural preservation through innovative digital experiences. Founded in 2003, the company’s expertise evolved from post-production software to developing groundbreaking te reo Māori digital learning applications, establishing new standards in how technology can preserve and promote Indigenous languages and cultures.
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Custom D – AWS Partner Spotlight
Custom D is a New Zealand-based software development company and an AWS ISV Partner. Their flagship product, Caitlyn, is a white-label generative AI platform designed to surface critical insights from complex content in trusted, secure ways—without compromising on accuracy or control. Whether used in cultural preservation, finance, compliance, or agri-tech, Caitlyn helps teams and platforms unlock the full value of their proprietary knowledge that provides an advanced monitoring solution for cloud apps and modern infrastructure that aggregates metrics across distributed services to alert you on service-wide issues and trends in real-time.