RobotsMali

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

🚀 Exciting News: Two New Open-Source Bambara ASR Models! Were 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 maintaining efficient enough for real-world deployment. 🧐 Why Does This Matter? Bambara is a very [...]

RobotsMali AI4D Lab Unveils Two Open-Source Models for Vocal Recognition in Bambara 1. Introduction Self-recognition of speech (ASR) is a growing field, but low-resource languages such as Bambara remain largely absent from technological advances. Bambara is a major vehicular language in West Africa, used [...]