About the project
Rah Sharma was born in Fiji, into a Fiji Indian family, speaking Fiji Baat at home the way generations before him did. It's a language — not just an accent on Standard Hindi, but its own dialect, shaped by history, migration, and a community that made a new home in the Pacific.
And yet, open any voice assistant, translation app, or speech-recognition tool today, and Fiji Baat doesn't exist. Standard Hindi is there. English is there. Fiji Baat — spoken by hundreds of thousands of people across Fiji and the diaspora in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and beyond — has never had a place in any of it.
Rah is the founder of Nighthawk Productions, where his work has focused on video production and the tools that go with it — transcription, dubbing, syncing audio to picture. Building those tools surfaced an obvious gap: every one of them assumed the language being spoken was already digitally "known." Fiji Baat wasn't. There was no dataset, no model, no starting point at all.
So the project began simply: record real people speaking real Fiji Baat, phrase by phrase, and use those recordings to train the first voice model the dialect has ever had.
This isn't a lab project built from a distance. Every recording comes from a real contributor — a Fiji Indian, at home or in the diaspora, holding a button and speaking a phrase into their phone. The voice being built is, quite literally, made of the community's own voices.
As the dataset grows, it trains a genuine Fiji Baat text-to-speech voice — the foundation for free tools the community can actually use: translation, dubbing, accessibility features for elders more comfortable in Fiji Baat than English. Where it makes sense, the same voice and dataset also support paid work through Nighthawk Productions and licensing partnerships — the two aren't in conflict; the free tools and the business side both come from the same underlying project.
If you speak Fiji Baat, your voice is exactly what this project needs — contribute a few recordings. If you run a business, media outlet, or organisation and want to explore working together, reach out.
