Communications

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 […]

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! 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 […]

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 […]