The linguistic diversity of Africa and Its absence in AI development
Although Africa is home to a huge proportion of the world's languages – well over a quarter according to some estimates - many are missing when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
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00:00As the use of AI language models saw with AI-powered websites becoming part of daily life for millions around the world,
00:07some in Africa are concerned that citizens are being excluded from Western-focused software.
00:13ETHOs are now being made in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria to create more AI products in African languages.
00:19The use of AI is penetrating even villages where farmers are even incorporating chat GPTs in translating some of the language modules.
00:28I think farming is a lifelong learning experience.
00:34You hit a lot of challenges.
00:37You can see my cabbages, they're like opening, so I can go into AI and ask that my cabbages are opening what that is.
00:44Or I think for somebody in the rural areas like me who is not exposed to technology or anything, you can ask in a simple language.
00:54There are already small examples of how indigenous languages used in AI can be used to solve real-life challenges in Africa, according to Professor Marivet.
01:04And add their own innovations in those spaces, but we will provide some benchmark to say, here's Isindebele.
01:11For example, here's a new data set of audio with transcript for Isindebele, a language that in South Africa typically is one of the lowest resourced in those spaces.
01:20Researchers have recorded more than 9,000 hours of local speech to open up this transformative new technology to more people across the continent.
01:28These have vastly quantities of online text to drone form.
01:33In the very simple sense, you want people to have agency over their lives.
01:38From that perspective, we're engaging in assisting people in participating in a digital economy because they are now able to engage with these businesses that are providing essential products and services.
01:49But as many African languages are mostly spoken rather than written down, there is a lack of text to train AI and to make it useful for speakers of those languages.
02:00Four million across the continent, this means being left out.
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