In a petition that already has half a thousand subscribers -- available here - the authors ask "the authorities to design and implement a technological preparation plan for the Portuguese language for the era of Artificial Intelligence, with the informed support of the scientific community specialized in this area." "For the democratization of this technology, a plan that favors the development and open access to open source solutions for Portuguese language technology is vital, observing the due regulations," can be read in the petition. "Very soon, the use of the Portuguese language as the use of any other natural language and will be done through a permanent technological mediation," which includes automatic transcriptions of telephone conversations or meeting summaries, explained to Lusa António Branco, professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and one of the promoters of this petition. This summary could give "suggestions for changing the tone of voice, for example," explained António Branco. To this will be added automatic permanent translation systems in contact with a foreigner. Today, "this technological mediation technique is concentrated in three or four large technology companies and, yes, it is a cause for concern, because it creates immense dependence and jeopardizes the cultural autonomy and digital citizenship" of countries, he warned. In other countries, there is already concern in the defense of national languages, such as Sweden or the Netherlands or even Slovenia or Estonia, which invest in public use tools to protect their respective national languages. In Portugal, Brazil and the other Portuguese-speaking countries, there is "a feeling that there is still not enough awareness of the importance of this issue among decision-makers and authorities," added António Branco. The petition resulted from a meeting of researchers in March in Galicia, called Propor, at the 16th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese. "As a result of the progress of AI, and Language Technology in particular, we are faced with the promises and unprecedented challenges of a civilizational transformation induced by a technological shock of a scope never before experienced," write the authors, recalling that "no area of human activity will be immune to this technological shock." If the technological mediation of the Portuguese language "continues to be ensured only by a small number of technological giants, this narrowed dependence will induce unprecedented risks and limitations to communication between speakers, digital citizenship and cultural autonomy," can be read in the manifesto. Therefore, the authors advocate a plan defined by political decision-makers that takes "advantage of the international projection of Portuguese as a global, multicentric language and its coexistence with other languages in the Ibero-American, African and global space, including indigenous languages and Galician, as well as border and exchange languages." Also Read: Creation of AI is an opportunity to rethink human wisdom, says author (Portuguese version)