AFRICA, Sept. 8 -- ALTHOUGH Africa is home to a huge proportion of the worlds languages – well over a quarter according to some estimates – many are missing when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

This is both an issue of a lack of investment and readily available data.

Most AI tools, such as ChatGPT, used today are trained on English as well as other European and Chinese languages.

These have vast quantities of online text to draw from. But as many African languages are mostly spoken rather than written down, there is a lack of text to train AI on to make it useful for speakers of those languages. For millions across the continent this means being left out.

According, Vukosi Marivate “We th...