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African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems --…

Voice or Speech Commands are a subset of the broader Spoken Word Corpus of a language which are essential for non-contact control of and activation of larger AI systems in devices used in everyday life especially for persons with…

Despite recent progress in multilingual speech processing, African languages remain under-represented in both research and deployed systems, particularly when it comes to strong, open-weight encoders that transfer well under low-resource…

Bengali is one of the most spoken languages in the world with over 300 million speakers globally. Despite its popularity, research into the development of Bengali speech recognition systems is hindered due to the lack of diverse open-source…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study…

For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) converts the human voice into readily understandable and categorized text or words. Although Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, there have been very few studies on Bengali…

Question answering (QA) systems are now available through numerous commercial applications for a wide variety of domains, serving millions of users that interact with them via speech interfaces. However, current benchmarks in QA research do…

The Igbo language is facing a risk of becoming endangered, as indicated by a 2025 UNESCO study. This highlights the need to develop language technologies for Igbo to foster communication, learning and preservation. To create robust,…

Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of…

ASR has achieved remarkable global progress, yet African low-resource languages remain rigorously underrepresented, producing barriers to digital inclusion across the continent with more than +2000 languages. This systematic literature…

Yor\`ub\'a an African language with roughly 47 million speakers encompasses a continuum with several dialects. Recent efforts to develop NLP technologies for African languages have focused on their standard dialects, resulting in…

Searching for an available, reliable, official, and understandable information is not a trivial task due to scattered information across the internet, and the availability lack of governmental communication channels communicating with…

This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in seven South…

Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages…

Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world's 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. We address this pressing issue for Africa by…

Recent advances in speech-enabled AI, including Google's NotebookLM and OpenAI's speech-to-speech API, are driving widespread interest in voice interfaces globally. Despite this momentum, there exists no publicly available…

Reproducible benchmarks are crucial in driving progress of machine translation research. However, existing machine translation benchmarks have been mostly limited to high-resource or well-represented languages. Despite an increasing…

In the last 5 years, the availability of large audio datasets in African countries has opened unlimited opportunities to build machine intelligence (MI) technologies that are closer to the people and speak, learn, understand, and do…

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…