Tech companies drive AI development for Africa's languages

Tech companies drive AI development for Africa’s languages

There is a determined effort being made to ensure that those who speak Shona, Hausa, Xhosa, Kiswahili, and a variety of other African languages have equal access to the most recent advancements in technological fields. 

Among these languages are Swahili, Xhosa, and Kiswahili.

An early innovator in the field of technology named Kathleen Siminyu, who currently resides in Kenya, was once reported as saying, “It’s puzzling that there are so few AI tools for African languages.” Through the work that she does at the Masakhane Research Foundation, she has made it her mission to make artificial intelligence (AI) tools as accessible as possible to those who speak African languages.

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The authors of the research highlight how important it is to provide assistance for material that was produced in Africa. They emphasise how important it is to develop fundamental resources such as dictionaries, spell checkers, and keyboards for these languages, in addition to lowering the financial and administrative barriers that prevent government statements from being translated into a variety of national tongues, including African languages.

The organisation’s goal is to broaden the scope of its investigation and find solutions to problems that could make it more difficult to use the technology. Their discoveries have the potential to contribute to the preservation of African languages that are native to the continent.

They did agree that there were certain limitations within their group, but they pointed out that “all of the researchers who participated in this study are Anglophone.” According to what was mentioned by them, “because of this, the participation of Francophone and Lusophone African stakeholders from relevant groups is absolutely necessary.”

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About Artificial intelligence 

The simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, most notably computer systems, is referred to as artificial intelligence (AI for short). Expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision are all examples of specific uses of artificial intelligence.

The term “artificial intelligence” (AI) is often used to refer to the process of recreating human intelligence in computer programmes or systems. Learning, reasoning, and perception may all be improved with the help of computers, which is one of the goals of artificial intelligence. Today, artificial intelligence is being employed in a wide variety of fields, from banking to healthcare.