Blog

06 May 25

🧠 RobotsMali AI4D Lab at NAACL 2025

🧠 RobotsMali AI4D Lab at NAACL 2025 We’re proud to share that RobotsMali AI4D Lab researchers have published a paper on the use of Generative AI to create books in Bambara in the Findings of the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025) — one of the […]

23 Apr 25

RobotsMali AI4D Lab Press Release

RobotsMali AI4D Lab Press Release RobotsMali AI4D Lab, Mali’s international anglophone and Malian national languages AI lab, was a featured innovator at the Global AI Summit Africa (GAIS), April 3-4, and participated in 3 additional workshops in a week which saw a brilliant, continent-wide future for AI in Africa traced out in a series of […]

18 Apr 25

RobotsMali Language Policy

RobotsMali Language Policy RobotsMali AI4D Lab is proud to announce that English and Mali’s national languages are now our primary working languages. French will be progressively phased out, though it will remain a “language of last resort” during the transition period as our staff and the broader Malian public shift toward greater use of English […]

04 Mar 25

Vers Une Littérature Enfantine Moderne en Bambara: La Collection GAIFE

Vers Une Littérature Enfantine Moderne en Bambara: La Collection GAIFE Authors: Nouhoum Souleymane COULIBALY | RobotsMali AI4D Lab, Bamako, Mali, research@robotsmali.org Au Mali la Lecture s’implante au Sein de la Communauté Dans le quartier Baco Djicoroni ACI à Bamako, M. Abdoulaye COULIBALY a créé un petit club de lecture avec les livres de la collection […]

03 Mar 25

The Serendipity of Claude AI : Case of the 13 low-resource national languages of Mali

The Serendipity of Claude AI : Case of the 13 Low-Resource National Languages of Mali Authors: By Alou DEMBELE, Nouhoum Souleymane COULIBALY, Michael LEVENTHAL RobotsMali AI4D Lab, Bamako, Mali, research@robotsmali.org Keywordsnational language – Artificial Intelligence – Education – Claude AI – Low-resource languages - Linguistic technologies. Abstract Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural […]

28 Feb 25

AI, Illiteracy, and Written Language in Mali

AI, Illiteracy, and Written Language in Mali Nouhoum Coulibaly, Alou Dembele, Michael Leventhal | RobotsMali AI4D Lab | Bamako, Mali | research@robotsmali.org Abstract This paper examines the potential contribution of AI to reducing extreme rates of illiteracy in Mali, taking as its point of departure research that has demonstrated that education exclusively in French, a […]

26 Feb 25

Intention is All You Need : NLP for the Rest of World

Intention is All You Need : NLP for the Rest of World This is the story of a home-grown machine translation initiative working on an under-resourced language in a near-zero resource environment, equipped with the bare minimum of science but intimate knowledge of our languages and communities and the desire to perform miracles. We have […]

26 Feb 25

Making Development the Objective of AI4D Changes Everything

Making Development the Objective of AI4D Changes Everything Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI4D) is a growing network of cooperating African labs, launched in 2020 with funding from Canadian and Swedish international development agencies for the purpose of furthering African AI research directed at African development. AI4D is also a paradigm shift, which impacts why we […]

13 Feb 25

🚀 Exciting News: Two New Open-Source Bambara ASR Models!

🚀 Exciting News: Two New Open-Source Bambara ASR Models! We’re thrilled to announce the release of two lightweight Bambara ASR models from our early fine-tuning experiments! These models achieve near-SOTA performance for open-source Bambara ASR (as of Feb 2025) while remaining efficient enough for real-world deployment. 🧐 Why Does This Matter? Bambara is a severely […]

13 Feb 25

RobotsMali AI4D Lab Dévoile Deux Modèles Open-Source pour la Reconnaissance Vocale en Bambara

RobotsMali AI4D Lab Dévoile Deux Modèles Open-Source pour la Reconnaissance Vocale en Bambara 1. Introduction La reconnaissance automatique de la parole (ASR) est un domaine en plein essor, mais les langues à faibles ressources, comme le bambara, restent largement absentes des avancées technologiques. Le bambara est une langue véhiculaire majeure en Afrique de l’Ouest, utilisée […]