Understanding Uliza: How interactivity creates lasting impacts

It's not uncommon for Radio Simba to receive 17,000 calls over a couple of days from listeners to its radio programs. The listeners leave voice recordings sharing their feedback and questions with the popular Ugandan radio station.?

They’re calling in using Uliza Interactive, a digital suite of services that Farm Radio developed that combines radio, mobile phones and, often, interactive voice response systems to enable listeners to communicate and exchange information with their radio station quickly, easily and free of charge.

It’s the same technology we use for our On Air Dialogues, a type of radio program that combines radio broadcasts with mobile phone-based polls to gather listeners’ perspectives on a topic.

But, 17,000 people calling in presents some challenges.?

The astounding number of responses from listeners and the variety of languages makes it hard for our team of staff and volunteers to transcribe all the responses, let alone do thorough analysis of listeners’ feedback.

And so we turned to artificial intelligence to make the transcription work easier and more efficient. In 2022, Farm Radio partnered with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to test the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe voice recordings from listeners.

It’s a work in progress since ASR models tend to be more familiar with languages from the Global North. We decided to start by training the model in Luganda, a popular language in Uganda, because we have a large data set available in this language.?

Artificial intelligence. Automatic speech recognition … it’s a far cry from where Uliza Interactive began.

Learn where Uliza began, how it works, and its impact here.