Lelapa AI: Putting Power Into the Hands of African People With AI Solutions

Wednesday - November 22 2023, 06:28 UTC - 1 year ago

Lelapa AI, a venture collaboration between two computer scientists, is trying to use machine learning to create tools that specifically work for Africans and put power back into the hands of African people. Recently, they've released Vulavula, an AI tool that can detect different languages spoken in South Africa. Although there are currently efforts being made to include certain languages in AI models, African AI researchers say these translations are still a long way from an accurate digital representation of African languages.

Inside a co-working space in the Rosebank neighborhood of Johannesburg, Jade Abbott popped open a tab on her computer and prompted ChatGPT to count from 1 to 10 in isiZulu, a language spoken by more than 10 million people in her native South Africa. The results were "mixed and hilarious," says Abbott, a computer scientist and researcher.

Then she typed in a few sentences in isiZulu and asked the chatbot to translate them into English. Once again, the answers? Not even close. Although there have been efforts to include certain languages in AI models even when there is not much data available for training, to Abbott, these results show that the technology "really still isn’t capturing our languages." .

Abbott’s experience mirrors the situation faced by Africans who don’t speak English. Many language models like ChatGPT do not perform well for languages with smaller numbers of speakers, especially African ones. But a new venture called Lelapa AI, a collaboration between Abbott and a biomedical engineer named Pelonomi Moiloa, is trying to use machine learning to create tools that specifically work for Africans.

Vulavula, a new AI tool that Lelapa released today, converts voice to text and detects names of people and places in written text (which could be useful for summarizing a document or searching for someone online). It can currently identify four languages spoken in South Africa—isiZulu, Afrikaans, Sesotho, and English—and the team is working to include other languages from across Africa.The tool can be used on its own or integrated into existing AI tools like ChatGPT and online conversational chatbots. The hope is that Vulavula, which means "speak" in Xitsonga, will make accessible those tools that don't currently support African languages.

The lack of AI tools that work for African languages and recognize African names and places excludes African people from economic opportunities, says Moiloa, CEO and cofounder of Lelapa AI. For her, working to build Africa-centric AI solutions is a way to help others in Africa harness the immense potential benefits of AI technologies. "We are trying to solve real problems and put power back into the hands of our people," she says.

There are thousands of languages in the world, 1,000 to 2,000 of them in Africa alone: it’s estimated that the continent accounts for one-third of the world’s languages. But though native speakers of English make up just 5% of the global population, the language dominates the web—and has now come to dominate AI tools, too.

Some efforts to correct this imbalance already exist. OpenAI’s GPT-4 has included minor languages like Icelandic. In February 2020, Google Translate started supporting five new languages spoken by about 75 million people. But the translations are shallow, the tool often gets African languages wrong, and it’s still a long way from an accurate digital representation of African languages, African AI researchers say.

Earlier this year, for example, the Ethiopian computer scientist Asmelash Teka Hadgu ran the same experiments that Abbott ran with ChatGPT at a premier African AI conference in Kigali, Rwanda. When he asked t Series to count from 1 to 10 in Amharic, the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, which over 38 million people, the composite scores for accuracy were dismal.