Voice-activated virtual assistant technologies such as Siri and Alexa are becoming increasingly common around the world, but in Africa, with its many languages, most people are at a digital disadvantage. To address the problem, researchers are creating translation tools to recognize and promote Indigenous languages such as Yoruba.
Oluwafemi Awosanya, who teaches Yoruba, said he often struggles to transfer his class modules to an online student site he created because there is no speech recognition technology for that language. As a result, Awosanya spends several hours manually editing and correcting his notes before uploading them to his blog.
Awosanya said that despite technological advances in Africa, languages like Yoruba, one of the most commonly spoken in Nigeria, remain neglected. “It limits knowledge. There are things you want to educate the children on, things you want to exhibit in the classes,” he said.
The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs estimates that around 2,000 distinct languages are spoken in Africa. Researchers say around two-thirds of the native speakers miss out on emerging technologies due to language limitations in the tech world.
Nigerian writer and language proponent Kola Tubosun said this issue endangers Africa’s technological future. To help promote language and inclusivity, he created an online Yoruba dictionary and a text-to-speech English-to-Yoruba translation engine.
“There are lots of obstacles,” Tubosun said. “Some languages are not written down and some don’t have scripts. Some languages have scripts but don’t have many people speaking or writing them in educational settings or using them in daily conversations.”
“If a language doesn’t exist in the technology space, it’s almost as if it doesn’t exist at all,” Tubosun said. “If you spend all your time online every day and the only language you encounter is English, Spanish, Mandarin, or whatever else, then it tends to define the way you interact with the world. And over time you tend to lose either the interest in your own language or your competency in that language.”
Read Full Article from Voice of America (NY) (01/26/22)
Author: Obiezu, Timothy
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