From Swahili to Zulu, African techies develop AI language tools

African techies pioneer AI tools in local languages to bridge the digital divide but data scarcity, ethical concerns are challenges. — Unsplash

LAGOS/NAIROBI/JOHANNESBURG: When the Nigerian government announced plans in April to develop a multilingual AI tool to boost digital inclusion across the West African nation, 28-year-old computer science student Lwasinam Lenham Dilli was thrilled.

Dilli had struggled to scrape datasets from the Internet to build a large language model (LLM), used to power AI chatbots, in his native Hausa language as part of his final-year project at university.