OpenAI and Meta AI might soon speak to you in any African language

Africa represents 20% of Earth's land area and boasts over 2,000 languages, making it the second continent with the most linguistic diversity. Despite this, in the ever-evolving world, the continent is still left behind, with just a handful of global companies working on ways to preserve, integrate or promote African languages in their services.

With the increase in the adoption of AI technology, African languages too matter. That's why French telecommunications giant, Orange SA is said to be teaming up with tech giants Meta and OpenAI to develop language models for African languages.

Reuters reports that the project is expected to kick off in early 2025. It would be focused on getting two West African languages, Wolof and Pulaar, into Open AI's "Whisper" and Meta's "Llama" software, potentially breaking the barrier for up to 22 million people that speak the language in the region.

In case you don't know, Wolof is a language spoken mainly in Senegal, Gambia and southern Mauritania, and by over 10 million people in West Africa, France, the U.S., and other parts of the world. On the other hand, Pulaar is a Fula language spoken in West and Central Africa by the Fula and Toucouleur peoples in Senegal, Mauritania, the Gambia, western Mali, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone.

The plan appears to be for Orange SA to supply the context bank that supposedly enables the machines to learn on unlimited content. If all goes well, Orange would then incorporate this into its customer support, allowing it to communicate with customers in their local languages.

Orange will also make it available to other sectors like public health and public education, for non-commercial use. With a signed agreement for the telecoms group to get direct access to OpenAI's models in Europe, this project is expected to be done quickly and properly since OpenAI is the leading AI company right now.

With some African countries like Egypt and Nigeria accounting for some of Facebook's largest audience with 46.2 million and 38.6 million users respectfully, per Statista, it would benefit Meta in penetrating those continents deeper.

With more big tech companies looking to shift focus into other countries like Nvidia in talks with Indian companies, Africa might be the next largest unharnessed mine of potential.

Language has always been a tricky road to pave. Many languages have so many variations, rules and exceptions to those rules that even human speakers sometimes struggle. This is why, quite often, new product releases that involve language launch with one or just a handful of languages without really diving into more regional languages.

But, with the rate at which artificial intelligence has evolved and can be integrated into problems, it would be interesting to see how this project turns out. Many people can't wait to have a deep one-on-one conversation with their devices in their mother tongue. My mother can benefit from this.