My first love is creating apps that help people.
That's why I created the Ojibway language app,
to help teach my 12-year-old daughter how to speak Ojibway.
Like any parent, I bought her books, and I bought her CDs.
I even bought her books with CDs
(Laughter)
but they failed in their intended purpose.
She never learnt Ojibway, and many of the books still lie unopened.
I wonder if I still have the receipts.
When you think about it,
books really aren't a great way to teach the language.
Around that time, I had just bought her a brand new iPad, about four years ago.
And she used it every day.
She loved it, she thought it was the coolest thing,
and she never put it down.
I decided to use that connection
to teach and have her learn some basic Ojibway.
I spent about a month creating the Ojibway language app.
I never intended to release it or even share it with anyone.
A couple of weeks later, I was sitting at my kitchen table quietly,
and I heard my daughter speaking Ojibway.
She was on the phone with her grandmother.
She was using the app, she was speaking Objibway;
that was truly a magical moment, and it touched my heart.
And I knew that I had to share the app with everyone.
I wanted every parent to experience that magical moment.
when their child is speaking their native language.
So that's what I did, I released the app for free.
And I can tell you that the next time I saw the app being used
was by my three-year-old daughter.
She was using the app
to count to five in Ojibway and say a few other words,
and I just happened to catch it on video.
Let's take a look.
That's great, so, with my first app in the App Store,
I can tell you that I received a lot of criticism.
And the first piece of advice I got right away was,
"You should sell the app for 99 cents, don't release the app for free,
don't give it away."
The next piece of advice I got was from a famous celebrity investor.
He said, "I don't see the value in it, I'm out."
Come to think of it. I forgive them.
Neither of them realized the magnitude of language extinction.
It's estimated that if nothing is done,
nearly half of 6,000 plus languages spoken today will disappear
by the end of the century.
After releasing the app to the App Store and distributing it for free,
I wanted to do more.
I still felt that that wasn't enough. I had to do more.
There were so many other languages that needed help,
and I decided to follow with this just crazy idea,
just an idea I've always wanted to do.
"Why not release the app source code for free?
And allow every single tribe
to download it, and use it, and distribute it?"
And I could tell you the same critics that were giving me advice then,
called me insane.
So that's what I did,
I released the source code online, and I distributed it for free.
And I noticed that a lot of the tribes
started using the source code,
and my phone started ringing at weird hours of the night
from numbers that I didn't recognize.
When you release something online,
like anything, like source code, it truly goes global.
I found myself talking with the Sami tribe,
the tribal government of Norway,
giving them advice on how to create a language app.
A tribe in New Zealand, a tribe in Australia,
a tribe in North America as well.
I started out also training some of these tribes
to create their own language apps and empowering these tribes.
But right here, at home,
a grand chief from Northern Manitoba heard about what I was doing,
and he shared a story with me about residential schools.
Now, I've never been to residential schools,
but I can imagine how difficult it was for him to share.
If you don't know what residential schools are
- or boarding schools, as they're commonly known as -
they were government-funded institutions designed to assimilate the Indian
often using brutal methods.
He started out by saying, "The nuns in residential schools would tell me
that they were going to kill my language.
I never realized what they meant until 30 years later."
When he found that his son couldn't speak Cree.
Now, accomplishing something of great magnitude
is by no means a one-person job.
We need help.
And that reminds me of a story of when my youngest daughter was 3 years old
from the time she could walk, like any child,
she always wanted to help.
So one day, we went grocery shopping,
and I gave her a bag of oranges to carry into the house.
She walked all the way down the street, and she walked all the way up the walk.
And when she got to the bottom of the stairs,
she said, "Dad, I can't do it."
So I walked past her with my hands full,
and I said, "Yes, you can! Believe in yourself."
Moments later, she comes into the house with nothing in her hands,
and I said, "Baby, what happened?"
And she said, "Mum believed in herself!"
(Laughter)
And that was the girl that you saw there in the video.
Accomplishing something of great magnitude
is by no means a one-person job.
We all have a responsibility to save these tribal languages.
Since releasing the Ojibway app, we've had over 100,000 downloads.
And since releasing the source code,
we've had over 40,000 downloads.
It's estimated that our source code, and the work that we're doing
is helping to create over 60 language apps.
and that is, by no means, me doing it alone;
that's the help of teachers,
that's the help of students, and that's the help of parents.
What's it like to get a phone call
from a tribe that has only two or three living speakers left?
Well, I've gotten a few of these calls,
and I could tell you that it's very humbling.
Their languages could be gone tomorrow, their elders could be gone tomorrow
taking with them thousands of words, thousands of phrases,
and hundreds of years of oral history.
Together, all those language apps,
it's estimated that they have 200,000 downloads.
So the next time you look in your smartphone,
why not download an app and learn how to speak in a new way?
You'll be helping to strengthen global languages today.
Thank you.
(Applause)