French telecoms giant Orange, which is the largest mobile operator in Botswana, is partnering with OpenAI and Meta to enable large language models (LLMs) to translate regional African languages that are not understood by current AI models.
The partnership will culminate in custom AI models capable of allowing customers to communicate naturally in their local languages with Orange for customer support and sales. The open-source AI models will also be provided externally by Orange with a free license for non-commercial use such as for public health, public education, and many other services.
"Orange intends to help drive AI innovation in these regional languages, including by collaborating on these new AI models with local startups and other technology companies, and by doing so, to mitigate the growing digital divide faced by people all across the African continent," the company said in a statement.
The project will commence in 2025 and will initially focus on incorporating regional languages, namely Wolof and Pulaar, spoken by 16 million people and six million people, respectively, in West Africa. The long-term goal is to work with many AI technology providers to enable future models to recognize all African languages spoken and written across Orange’s 18-country footprint in the region.
"By fine-tuning leading AI models such as OpenAI’s ‘Whisper’ speech model and Meta’s ‘Llama’ text model with diverse examples of these languages, we will enable them to better understand these regional languages."