Google has launched a program that understands African languages
Google has launched WAXAL, a project to create a dataset for speech recognition in 21 African languages.
The main goal of the project is to enable Africans to create technologies in their own languages. This will enable more than 100 million people in sub-Saharan Africa to use voice technology.
The dataset covers 21 languages, including Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Luganda, Swahili, and others, and contains over 11,000 hours of speech data from nearly two million recordings.
The project is the result of joint efforts of African institutions and experts from Uganda, Ghana, and Rwanda.
WAXAL is expected to not only support innovations in artificial intelligence, but also help preserve African languages digitally. The full data set has been released under an open license and is available today on the Hugging Face website.
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