Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are creating new opportunities. However, as a recent study suggests, these benefits are mainly aimed at speakers of predominant languages, such as English and French, for example, in products such as ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, there is an effort to ensure that speakers of Shona, Hausa, Xhosa, Kiswahili and other African languages can also take advantage of these technological advances, as the Tech in Africa portal reveals.
“It’s baffling that AI tools for African languages are so scarce,” comments Kathleen Siminyu, a technology leader based in Kenya. Through her work at the Masakhane Research Foundation, she is dedicated to providing Artificial Intelligence tools accessible to speakers of African languages.
“Inclusion and participation in the development of language technology cannot be an afterthought; it must be a top priority from the outset,” she adds.
Siminyu is leading a study published in the journal Cell Press Patterns, which presents a strategy for improving AI tools dedicated to African languages. At the centre of this initiative is the availability of specific linguistic datasets to train computers to deal with African languages.
According to Tech in Africa, the authors of the study emphasise the importance of promoting African content. They stress the need to create essential resources such as dictionaries, spell-checkers and keyboards for these languages, and to minimise the financial and administrative obstacles to translating government messages into various national languages, including African ones.
The group intends to extend its research and tackle the challenges that may prevent access to the technology. Their findings could also contribute to the preservation of native African languages.
Tech in Africa emphasises that the researchers recognised the shortcomings of their team, noting that “all the researchers involved in this study are Anglophones. It is therefore essential to include francophone and lusophone African stakeholders from relevant groups”.
