and finally tonight Princeton High School has done it again for the second time in three years a group of research students were named National winners in a tech competition bringing home more than $100,000 to their school from Samsung's Sol for tomorrow contest their invention an AI powerered robot designed to help people learn an ancient language in danger of Disappearing Ted Goldberg has their story meet CH hi too a raccoon looking robot helping to keep a language alive nobody has done ever this like and it's really really fantastic and cool because it's going to help to preserve my language CH is a robot that communicates in mom a language spoken by half a million people indigenous to Guatemala and thousands of people in America it was developed by Princeton High School students along side moms speaking students from other schools Statewide when I call my grandma inala she only speaks mom she feels really happy that I'm able to share my culture with a lot of people these students developed two models of chw one that uses a push button to repeat a handful of mom phrases and an AI version that can respond to speech with those phrases both of them were part of a national research competition in Washington DC and I got really nervous because there was a lot of people in front of me it was like like teaching people um my um like my culture my people my country and like my language is part of my identity this was just incredibly ambitious and there were so many moments was like are we going to be able to pull it off but then it finally came together in the end CH was one of three winners among high schoolers bringing $100,000 in prize money to Princeton High School science teacher Mark eastburn says these robots originally were going to be used as therapy aids for children before taking a turn into Linguistics and ai ai is just like another tool that we can use our team sees this as more of a tool to in our case help preserve indigenous languages fewer than a million people speak mom worldwide and there aren't many resources online about it to help Chu build its vocabulary students have reached out to people they know in Guatemala to speak and Mom purposefully pursuing people with different voice pitches it eliminates like um the possibility of oh the model doesn't recognize this word because it's at a different pitch but even though like you know it's the same word we've been in contact with several Villages um who can give us audio recordings of just simple Greetings or um sentences that can train the our acoustic model in the artificial intelligence landscape the code took a few months to write there is a lot of cod like any AI project CH is still learning and the students here are proud of what they've learned and accomplished I think just getting the robotics working in like the sh time we had and also the AI portion of it because we use some complicated server stuff with the AI so that's also hard and I'm proud of that working I want to teach other people that it's important to stay with that language because it's part of your identity and it shows who you are we wanted to make this sustainable right and so part of that is making sure we use recycled materials and so our idea was that we would use recycled materials in kaha and they could send it over to us kaha is a town in Guatemala supplying the furry exteriors for chill students hope his friendly face can help make Mom more widespread some of the people think that speaking mom is like something you should be embarrassed about which I don't know why they think that way but I feel like this is going to change their mind CH remember Princeton students are in the process of getting a patent for chill and the push button version could be available for sale as soon as this summer in Princeton I'm Ted Goldberg NJ Spotlight news [Music]