African languages for AI: project that’s gathering huge new dataset

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Siri or Google Assistant are developed by the global north and trained in English, Chinese or European languages. In comparison, African languages are largely missing from the internet.

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…