{"id":176250,"date":"2023-11-18T12:24:30","date_gmt":"2023-11-18T18:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/this-company-is-building-ai-for-african-languages"},"modified":"2023-11-18T12:24:30","modified_gmt":"2023-11-18T18:24:30","slug":"this-company-is-building-ai-for-african-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/this-company-is-building-ai-for-african-languages","title":{"rendered":"This company is building AI for African languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/this-company-is-building-ai-for-african-languages.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The AI startups working to build products that support African languages often get ignored by investors, says Hadgu, owing to the small size of the potential market, a lack of political support, and poor internet infrastructure. However, Hadgu says small African startups including Lesan, GhanaNLP, and Lelapa AI are playing an important role: \u201cBig tech companies do not give focus to our languages,\u201d he says, \u201cbut we cannot wait for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lelapa AI is trying to create a new paradigm for AI models in Africa, says Vukosi Marivate, a data scientist on the company\u2019s AI team. Instead of tapping into the internet alone to collect data to train its model, like companies in the West, Lelapa AI works both online and offline with linguists and local communities to gather data, annotate it, and identify use cases where the tool might be problematic.<\/p>\n<p>Bonaventure Dossou, a researcher at Lelapa AI specializing in natural-language processing (NLP), says that working with linguists enables them to develop a model that\u2019s context-specific and culturally relevant. \u201cEmbedding cultural sensitivity and linguistic perspectives makes the technological system better,\u201d says Dossou. For example, the Lelapa AI team built sentiment and tone analysis algorithms tailored to specific languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The AI startups working to build products that support African languages often get ignored by investors, says Hadgu, owing to the small size of the potential market, a lack of political support, and poor internet infrastructure. However, Hadgu says small African startups including Lesan, GhanaNLP, and Lelapa AI are playing an important role: \u201cBig tech [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,418,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-internet","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}