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Chatbots are intelligent conversational computer systems designed to mimic human conversation to enable automated online guidance and support. The increased benefits of chatbots led to their wide adoption by many industries in order to…
While many speakers of low-resource languages regularly code-switch between their languages and other regional languages or English, datasets of codeswitched speech are too small to train bespoke acoustic models from scratch or do language…
Recordings gathered with child-worn devices promised to revolutionize both fundamental and applied speech sciences by allowing the effortless capture of children's naturalistic speech environment and language production. This promise hinges…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) for African languages are continually improving, but the reasons behind these advances remain unclear. This paper presents the first systematic investigation into probing PLMs for linguistic knowledge about…
Speech-to-text capabilities on mobile devices have proven helpful for hearing and speech accessibility, language translation, note-taking, and meeting transcripts. However, our foundational large-scale survey (n=263) shows that the…
Code-switching refers to the usage of two languages within a sentence or discourse. It is a global phenomenon among multilingual communities and has emerged as an independent area of research. With the increasing demand for the…
Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…
Across the African continent, students grapple with various educational challenges, including limited access to essential resources such as computers, internet connectivity, reliable electricity, and a shortage of qualified teachers.…
Chatbots are one class of intelligent, conversational software agents activated by natural language input (which can be in the form of text, voice, or both). They provide conversational output in response, and if commanded, can sometimes…
Recent advancements in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in speech recognition and translation. However, existing models often suffer from a disconnect between perception and expression, resulting…
We present the Thiomi Dataset, a large-scale multimodal corpus spanning ten African languages across four language families: Swahili, Kikuyu, Kamba, Kimeru, Luo, Maasai, Kipsigis, Somali (East Africa); Wolof (West Africa); and Fulani…
Recent large language models (LLMs) show strong speech recognition and translation capabilities for high-resource languages. However, African languages remain dramatically underrepresented in benchmarks, limiting their practical use in…
As language and speech technologies become more advanced, the lack of fundamental digital resources for African languages, such as data, spell checkers and Part of Speech taggers, means that the digital divide between these languages and…
While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…
Most research on task oriented dialog modeling is based on written text input. However, users interact with practical dialog systems often using speech as input. Typically, systems convert speech into text using an Automatic Speech…
Recent advances in speech technologies have produced new tools that can be used to improve the performance and flexibility of speaker recognition While there are few degrees of freedom or alternative methods when using fingerprint or iris…
Building a usable radio monitoring automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is a challenging task for under-resourced languages and yet this is paramount in societies where radio is the main medium of public communication and discussions.…
This paper maps Africa's distinctive AI risk profile, from deepfake fuelled electoral interference and data colonial dependency to compute scarcity, labour disruption and disproportionate exposure to climate driven environmental costs.…
Speech is the fundamental means of communication between humans. The advent of AI and sophisticated speech technologies have led to the rapid proliferation of human-to-computer-based interactions, fueled primarily by Automatic Speech…
Conversational AIs, or chatbots, mimic human speech when conversing. Smart assistants facilitate the automation of several tasks that needed human intervention earlier. Because of their accuracy, absence of dependence on human resources,…