Africa’s time is now: we’re building language models for Africans

No shade on the Westerners, but there is a clear divide that excludes non-English speaking Africans from using digital services. This also limits the data needed for training machines in African languages. Try asking your voice assistant Siri to order an Uber in your mother tongue, it would be as lost as a tourist without a map! (Sorry Siri, but it’s true, still appreciate you though).

'The right to build technology in the language of our ancestors is the right to future imaginaries.' - Pelonomi Moiloa, CEO, Lelapa AI - Ted Talk, San Francisco.

VULAVULA PRODUCT RANGE SPOTLIGHT

Vulavula offers solutions that are tailored to meet the evolving needs of our clients. At the heart of Vulavula lie our three flagship products: Vulavula API, Vulavula Partnerships, and Vulavula Eval.?

For this newsletter edition our focus is on the Vulavula API. The Vulavula API is carefully crafted to empower users with cutting-edge capabilities, from facilitating flawless conversations to providing accurate transcription services and in-depth text analysis. The Vulavula API features aim to drive efficiency, productivity, and clarity of communication for our valued customers. A beta version is currently available through our self service portal on the playground but we are excited to be launching officially soon...

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHTS AND UPCOMING EVENTS?

Have you explored our playground yet? Encountered any issues? We apologise for any inconvenience caused but rest assured, we've had a productive sit down with our models, and they're now operating at their peak performance...mostly.?

But why take our word for it? Give it another go and share your thoughts with us via email, socials or through the feedback mechanism on the cards. Click here to land in the playground.?

Upcoming Events and Releases: We’re excited about launching our public-facing API in June 2024, after working through our beta. We will also be hosting a hackathon in June where Developers will get to experience and use our API to solve industry challenges.

??? - Vulavula API Hackathon - Coming winter 2024

?? - Vulavula API Launch - Coming winter 2024

Subscribe to this newsletter to be the first to receive launch related comms!

Model performance and improvements

Vulavula Transcribe: Our ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) benchmarks:?

• RSA English = 8.69% WER (AWS Transcribe = 14.09%)
• Afrikaans = 19.74% WER (Azure Speech = 24.97%)
• IsiZulu = 36.92% WER (Azure Speech = 67.41%)
• Sesotho = 29.43% WER (Google Speech = 40.14%)
• Diarisation = 2.91% DER

Vulavula Analyse: Our analyses models have been refined to include:

• ?Language Identification (English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, Sesotho): 89.86% accuracy
• Named Entity Recognition (isiZulu): 91% accuracy
• Sentiment Analysis (isiZulu): 61% accuracy

Try Out Our Models??

Experience our flagship features on The Vulavula playground today:?

Transcription: Convert South African voices into written text seamlessly.?

Entity Recognition: Identify key entities like people, places, and brands.

Sentiment Analysis: Understand the emotional tone of an isiZulu text.

Try the playground here: https://beta-vulavula.lelapa.ai/?

PUBLICATIONS

Our research team has been diligently working on several projects, and we're thrilled to announce our latest publications, check them out:?

Conferences?

1. EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, et al. (LREC-COLING 2024)?
2. AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Empowering COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages, Jiayi Wang, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sweta Agrawal, Ricardo Rei, Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat, Marek Masiak, Xuanli He, Sofia Bourhim, Andiswa Bukula, Muhidin Mohamed, Temitayo Olatoye, Hamam Mokayede, Christine Mwase, Wangui Kimotho, Foutse Yuehgoh, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Jessica Ojo, et al. (NAACL 2024)

Upcoming?

3. Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets, Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, et al. (In Review)?

LELAPA AI ENGAGEMENTS

To improve the lives of Africans using our technologies, we believe that it is important to engage with other organisations that are interested in the resource NLP cause. See what we have been up to by engaging with the podcast and panel recording below.

Applied Machine Learning Days in Africa (AMLD Africa)

Our Co-founder Dr Vukosi Marivate had the pleasure of attending the third edition of the Applied Machine Learning Days in Africa conference (AMLD Africa). The event served as a center for knowledge exchange, innovation, and collaboration among leading experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Watch the full panel here.?

Bona features in the Digitally Native Podcast?

Bonaventure Dossou, our esteemed Research Scientist, recently shared his insights on The Digitally Native Podcast hosted by Fungai Machirori.?

He delved into the differences between Large Language? Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.?

How Cool?

The AI 100 is CB Insights' annual list of the top private AI companies in the world. From new AI architectures to precision manufacturing. We are in the list, check it out here.

If you are interested in our offerings, let’s chat via email: [email protected]. Thank you for reading our first newsletter edition, subscribe to stay updated.