Case study - Campfire Studios

Vaka Ō Te Tupuna: the whānau keeps the recordings

Vaka Ō Te Tupuna - canoe of ancestors - helps Pasifika youth and whānau record kōrero with their elders and knowledge holders. The audio saves straight to the family's own Google Drive, and AI turns each recording into a transcript and a summary written with a cultural lens.

Talk to us about your projectSee what we did
The Vaka Ō Te Tupuna sign-in page: canoe of ancestors, your voice holds your story
Client
Campfire Studios, Mount Eden, Auckland
Built for
Pasifika youth and whānau
Our role
Web app and AI build, hosting and ongoing development
Live since
May 2025

Tupuna in numbers

  • 78,000+words of kōrero transcribed
  • 480+recordings transcribed and summarised
  • 290+people signed up
  • 9kōrero themes, from Language to Land

Live figures as at 19 September 2026.

The brief

Campfire Studios wanted a way for young people to sit down with their elders and capture their wisdom, experiences and stories for future generations - with that knowledge staying under the stewardship of the whānau, not a platform.

The app had to be simple to use, guide the conversation for people who have never run an interview, and treat every recording as a taonga.

What we built

Recording

Guided kōrero

  • Nine kōrero themes with prompt questions - Youth, Wisdom, Language, Traditions, Journey, Spirituality, Food, Love and Land - or a theme of your own
  • Record up to 15 minutes, with pause and resume and a live waveform
  • Note the elder's name, your relationship and anything else worth keeping, then add a photo
Storage

Saved to the family's own Drive

  • Sign in with Google, and every recording, photo, transcript and summary saves to a folder in your own Google Drive
  • Organised by theme, so the family can find, move or delete anything
  • The app can only see the files it created - nothing else in the Drive
AI

Transcripts and summaries

  • Each recording is transcribed on the server with OpenAI's Whisper
  • A summary written with a cultural framework: themes, te reo Māori and Pacific language use, whakapapa, place, and reflective questions for the whānau
  • Both saved to the family's Drive alongside the recording
Programme

A dashboard for Campfire

  • An admin dashboard for the Campfire team with an overview, searchable summaries and users
  • So the programme can see what is being recorded and support whānau

Built around whānau stewardship

Recordings of elders are taonga, so the design starts from who holds them.

  • Audio and photos are kept in the family's own Google Drive and never stored on our servers.
  • The app's Drive permission only covers the files it created.
  • Transcripts and summaries are also kept in the programme database, in Sydney, so Campfire can run and report on the programme - and the privacy policy says so plainly.
  • AI companies' web crawlers are blocked from the site.
  • The AI transcribes and summarises. It doesn't decide anything.

Part of a wider partnership

Tupuna is one of several apps we have built with Campfire Studios. The same care for cultural data runs through DigiKōr, the podcast learning platform for schools that is a finalist at the 2026 Aotearoa AI Awards.

In their words

Blake is an outstanding collaborator.

He is exceptionally well-suited to work with businesses of any size - whether small startups or large organisations. Blake has a unique ability to identify core challenges and ideas within a company and transform them into effective solutions. His expertise in AI, combined with his excellent people skills, enables him to deliver results that are both highly functional and cost-effective.

I highly recommend working with Blake.

Will (Viriamu) Fleming, Founder, Campfire Studios

Visit Vaka Ō Te Tupuna

Working with cultural knowledge?

Oral histories, language, taonga. We build tools that capture them carefully and keep them with the people they belong to.

Talk to us about your projectRead the DigiKōr case study

Last updated 19 September 2026