Last week, Google announced the launch of WAXAL, a large-scale open speech dataset for 21 Sub-Saharan African languages, such as Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Luganda, Swahili, and Acholi. The initiative is the brainchild of a partnership between the tech giant and African research institutions, and it’s designed to enhance artificial intelligence tools for African languages. To better understand the initiative and what Africa stands to benefit from it, Abdoulaye Diack, Program Manager at Google Research, shares more insights with Techpoint Africa on the progress made so far and how African researchers can position themselves to be part of it. After launching WAXAL, which covers 21 Sub-Saharan African languages. Are there plans to expand to other parts of Africa and cover more languages? Yes. W...