Benin Launches Its First Voice AI Application in a Local Language
Thanks to this model, millions of Beninese people will now be able to interact with technology in their native language, without the need to learn a foreign language.
This project is highly significant because although over 1,000 languages are spoken in West Africa, most digital services are only accessible to those who speak English or French.
The Fon language, which is widely spoken in Benin and many neighboring countries, had previously not found its place in the digital revolution.
However, with this newly developed AI model, that issue is now being addressed.
This model will particularly make life easier for locals in three key areas: locating on-call pharmacies, checking mobile money account balances, and receiving voice guidance on how to obtain a birth certificate.
A functional prototype of this voice AI in Fon will be delivered within nine months, using community-based voice data and trained on high-performance NVIDIA A100/H100 GPUs.
As promising as all this is, it is just the beginning. The main goal of the project is to adapt this model to other African languages and expand it into strategic areas such as smart agriculture, digital health, geolocation and mobility, digital public services, and education in local languages.
The next phase of the project will focus on scaling the model for nationwide deployment.