About
Pasifika AI is an independent, open-to-all, account-free and ad-free project, built by Kanaky Tech from Auckland, Aotearoa.
Why
Ask a general-purpose assistant what a customary gesture means, or how to say a simple word in a Kanak language. You will get a fluent, confident and often wrong answer: a Māori practice attributed to Kanak people, a word invented outright, one island's custom lent to another. This is not malice, it is scarcity. What documents these cultures is thinly digitised, often closed, sometimes paywalled. The model fills the gap.
More than thirteen hundred cultures live in this ocean. Conflating them is not a technical imprecision; it erases what makes one people distinct from another. This tool is an attempt to do it differently, at our scale.
How it is built
Two regimes, chosen automatically from the question.
Kanak languages. The assistant does not search the web. It reads an embedded index of 19,655 entries across nine languages, rebuilt from the Kanak language dictionary. It quotes only what is in it. When a word is absent, it says so.
The rest of the Pacific. A search restricted to 59 institutional domains, each one verified: language academies, universities, national museums, archives, regional organisations. Never the open web. Links shown to the reader are re-filtered against that same list, so an off-list citation cannot reach the page.
The safety net
After every answer, a mechanical check compares Kanak-language words against the index and shows the reader any that do not appear. This check runs outside the model: no instruction smuggled into a question can switch it off. The goal is not to always answer, it is to never invent.
What it costs
Nothing for you, and almost nothing for us: the service runs on open models and a capped daily budget. When the cap is reached, it resumes the next day. That is the trade-off of being open to all, and it is a choice — an account to create or an advert to watch would have shut out exactly the people this is built for.
What this site is not
It does not speak for any people. It reports what institutions have published, and names them. Some knowledge in the Pacific belongs to a clan, a lineage or an initiated group, and is not ours to publish: on those questions the only honest answer is to point to its custodians. It is also not legal, medical or administrative advice.
Get in touch
kanaky.xyz · Kanaky Tech on LinkedIn · The Kanak language dictionary