India, Oct. 17 -- A team of African experts is tackling the underrepresentation of African languages in AI by collecting diverse speech data for automatic speech recognition.

Supported by the Gates Foundation and Meta, the project spans Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, aiming to create AI models that reflect authentic language use and enhance accessibility to AI-driven services in local languages.

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 workin...