When Logan Maire first prototyped a language translation app, he had no idea what sort of community impact it would have.
“It’s been so rewarding to hear people talking on the radio about how they’ve enjoyed using the new Māori translation app, ‘Kupu’.
In its first five days the app has had over 80,000 users, translating over 1 million photos. The app is also currently the #1 Top Free app in both the New Zealand Google Play store, and the App Store.
The Auckland Hibiscus Ward member and father of five, was technical lead at Rush Digital for the Kupu app and has worked in partnership with Google, Rush, Spark, Colenso BBDO and Te Aka to realise the project.
“I feel so blessed in my career, I really did very poorly at school, but programming was something I could spend hours doing.”
His journey started when his dad brought home a computer and said, “Logan, here’s the manual, if you can program, this computer will do anything.”
Since then Logan has managed his own successful web design company and created others apps, one with over 10 million downloads!
“I have been blessed to have some great opportunities, it’s taken a lot of time and sacrifice, but it’s been worth it. In order to master anything you need to spend a lot of time doing it, it takes sacrifice, once you’ve found what you’re good at, work hard, put your mind to it and things will work out.”
Logan offers a helpful caution that we don’t allow too much screen time to take over our lives. He said, “I really feel like technology has been a distraction away from community, the family and gospel living. If we were to take technology away from our lives, we would find ourselves a lot less busy.”
Logan has enjoyed working on this project. It’s helping to promote the Māori language using technology in a positive way to bring communities closer together.
Learn more about the app here: https://kupu.co.nz/