8 Week Summer
Internship Program on
Frugal AI
Build Frugal Voice Models with the Saving Voices Project
A collaborative internship by Flipped.ai in partnership with Saving Voices, preserving indigenous languages through open-source frugal AI voice models.
About the Saving Voices Project
When a language disappears, it takes with it an entire worldview — unique knowledge of nature, history, medicine, and culture. Today, over 40% of the world's languages are endangered, many spoken by only a handful of elders.
The Saving Voices Project is a volunteer-led global initiative that harnesses the power of frugal AI to document and preserve those languages.
How We Preserve a Language
Partner with indigenous communities and appoint local community champions who understand the cultural context.
Community champions collect high-quality voice recordings — stories, songs, conversations — with full community consent.
Train lightweight, low-resource speech recognition and synthesis models designed for low-resource environments.
All datasets and models are published openly and given back to the community for education and cultural preservation.
Your 8-Week Journey
The Frugal AI course is included in this program. Complete the course, earn your certification, and dive into hands-on internship work — all within 8 weeks.
Learn the foundations of Frugal AI through our comprehensive course, included with your internship enrolment.
Pass assessments and earn your official Frugal AI certification from Flipped.ai before moving to the internship phase.
Apply your skills to the Saving Voices project, building real frugal voice models for indigenous language preservation.
What You'll Gain
Build real-world Frugal Voice Models for indigenous language preservation
Work directly with the Saving Voices community and researchers
Learn frugal AI techniques — lightweight models for low-resource environments
Gain hands-on experience with speech recognition & synthesis pipelines
Contribute to open-source datasets and models
Receive a certificate of completion from Flipped.ai & Saving Voices
The Soliga Tribe: Our First Voice Study
The Soliga are an indigenous community living in the forests of Karnataka, India. Our pioneering research documents their endangered language using frugal AI methods — a model for global indigenous language preservation.
One of Karnataka's oldest indigenous forest-dwelling communities, the Soliga have inhabited the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Wildlife Sanctuary for generations. Their language carries unique ecological and spiritual knowledge that cannot be translated.
Our team developed a frugal voice data collection pipeline working directly with community members. We recorded natural speech, oral traditions, and daily language use, producing a richly annotated dataset.
Using the collected data, we built lightweight ASR and TTS models designed to run on low-powered devices — ensuring accessibility regardless of infrastructure constraints.
The project was co-created with the community. Local members were trained as data collectors, ensuring ethical ownership, consent, and cultural sensitivity.
The Soliga voice dataset is being made publicly available to researchers and educators worldwide, supporting both AI research and language revitalization.
Our methodology is designed to scale across indigenous communities globally, offering a repeatable framework for language preservation using AI.
Enroll in the Internship Program
8 Week Summer Internship Program on Frugal AI with
Saving Voices Project
by Flipped.ai in collaboration with Saving Voices
This internship program on Frugal AI is conducted in collaboration with the Saving Voices Project.