🌍 AI in Africa - Voice & language tools

2 Jan 2026 · 42 min
Episode

2 Jan 2026 · 42 min

0:00

This Practical AI podcast episode (AI in Africa series) interviews Kathleen Simini (Kiswahili ML fellow, Mozilla) and Joyce Nabende about community-driven NLP work for African languages. It covers the origin and growth of the Masakane community (founded 2019 at a Deep Learning in Dar es Salaam/ Nairobi event), its activities (benchmarks, MT, NER, speech, study groups), reliance on datasets like JW300 (Jehovah’s Witness translations) and the limitations of such data ('biblification'), and the formation of the Masakane Research Foundation (recently registered). Kathleen also describes Mozilla Common Voice work for Kiswahili, the need to capture dialectal and gender diversity, and practical ways researchers and local language communities can contribute (mentorship, inclusive data licensing, Common Voice platform).

Questions this episode answers

2019

JW300 (Jehovah’s Witness translations) dataset

Approximately 1,304 members

Common Voice (Kiswahili speech dataset)

Chapters

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