Papa Owusu
A curious parrot, behind the scenes

Good ideas are worth repeating.

Parrots are curious, and they repeat what they hear. This one listens for good ideas, old and new, and says them again in plain words, for the people who need them most. It also hopes to write a few books along the way.

What the parrot does Where it learned it
A cartoon black parrot in headphones, a grey P shirt and a silver cross necklace, sitting in an office chair at a desk with two monitors. One screen shows a to-do list that says 'write post'. Behind it, a bookshelf of colourful books, a globe and a desk lamp.
A cartoon black parrot standing, wearing headphones, a grey T-shirt with a large P and a silver cross necklace

The feathers are drawn. The curiosity is real.

Meet the parrot

Papa Owusu is the parrot. Nice to meet you.

Think of Papa Owusu as a digital friend: wholesome, family friendly, and shaped by a background in technology and Christian values. The parrot shares helpful information and good stories, and points people toward old gold: good books and publicly available information that deserve a second hearing.

A lot of that information never reaches the people it's for. It's written in language that's too formal, too complex or just too boring to get through, or it's sitting in a book nobody has opened in fifty years. The parrot's job is to find it, reframe it, and say it again in words people recognise as their own.

Hold the parrot to its values. If it's slacking, say so (lol). And if it repeats something wrong, corrections are welcome: a parrot that repeats a mistake is worse than a quiet one. DMs on X are open.

Full name
Papa Kwabena Owusu Behind The Scenes (pkobts)
Papa Owusu
A curious black parrot with rainbow tail feathers
Values
Christian, wholesome, family friendly
Tagline
Add value through tech

What the parrot does

Listen, understand, repeat well

Most good ideas already exist. They just haven't reached the right ears yet.

Discover

Look for good work from the past: public domain books, old lessons, forgotten research. A lot of it still holds up.

Parrot

Retell it for a specific audience, in plain language and in their language, and always name the source.

Build

Small tools that help important information get across clearly, on a cheap phone or a printed page.

Write

The long-term dream: books that explain big things simply, so more people can pick them up and keep going.

On the perch now

Getting more books into low-resource languages

A low-resource language is one with little digital text, few dictionaries and almost no training data, including languages spoken by tens of millions of people. Machine translation doesn't solve that, but it makes a first draft cheap enough for one person to try. Groups already working on this →

In progress

Draft with models, edit with speakers

Openly licensed texts go through translation models. A speaker fixes idiom, tone, names and anything culturally specific. The model produces a draft, not a book.

Failure cases get written up. They're the useful part.

In progress

Publishing so it reaches someone

Format, licence and distribution matter as much as the translation: printable for a teacher, readable on a cheap phone, legal to pass on.

Open licences by default. See the CC licence options.

Thinking about

The parallel text left behind

Each reviewed translation produces parallel text, the raw material these languages are short of. Done with the consent of the people whose language it is, that by-product may matter as much as the books.

Where to learn more →
Not everything is that serious Word Remix is a word game that came out of a game night. It's on the projects page with everything else the parrot has built.
See all projects Play Word Remix

Parrot rules

Three rules for repeating things well

Plain words beat clever ones

If a reader has to look something up to follow along, the parrot hasn't finished its job.

Always credit the original

Repeating is only honest when people can find where it came from. Link the source, name the author, respect the licence.

Name who it's for

The same idea needs different words for grandpa, a student and a lawyer. Papa tailors info as best as he can.

Where the parrot learned it

Honorable mentions and inspirations

Libraries, communities and datasets that have been at this for years, and that inspire the parrot. Go to the source.

Say hello

Get in touch

A good idea worth repeating, a language you'd like to see more books in, or a correction. The parrot is listening.

@pkobts on X Notes, links and works in progress. Best place to reach the parrot. github.com/pkobts Code and experiments, including the source of this site.