A team of African computer scientists, linguists, language specialists and others have been working on precisely this problem for two years already. The African Next Voices project, primarily funded by the Gates Foundation (with other funding from Meta) and involving a network of African universities and organisations, recently released what’s thought to be the largest dataset of African languages for AI so far. We are seeing an upsurge of applications that rely on AI, from education to health to agriculture. These models are trained from large volumes of (mostly) linguistic (language) data. These are called large language models or LLMs but are found in only a few of the world’s languages.Languages also carry culture, values and local wisdom. If AI doesn’t speak our languages, it can’t reliably understand our intent, and we can’t trust or verify its answers. In short: without language, AI can’t communicate with us – and we can’t communicate with it. Building AI in our languages is therefore the only way for AI to work for people. Should Africans restrict AI models on its culture and language ?
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