Making ‘A Rather Queer Cuba Street’ with AI

On 6th August 2025 at National Library, Gareth Watkins and Dr Roger Smith from PrideNZ and Walk Tours NZ presented their work using off-the-shelf AI software to bring to life their oral history recordings of Cuba St, Wellington New Zealand.

Drawing on the PrideNZ archival audio collection, A Rather Queer Cuba Street was a site-based event that combined eye-witness audio clips, AI-generated human avatars, and live presentation to create an engaging, feature-rich historical experience.

From AI transcriptions of oral histories to AI-assisted identification of engaging quotations from long-form interviews, and the creation of video elements featuring AI human avatars.

Gareth Watkins is the founder and editor of PrideNZ. He, along with Roger Smith, co-founded Walk Tours NZ in 2017 – offering free community LGBTIQ+ walk tours around Wellington. Dr Roger Smith is also a contributor to PrideNZ and a past Trustee of the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (now Kawe Mahara).

Download a transcript of this talk (PDF)

Download slides used for this talk (PDF)

A video of the full talk is available on YouTube 

Note some of the audio played during the recording process does not always sound as good in our playback, we apologise for this.