Africa’s digital decade: AI upskilling and expanding speech technology
The next decade is set to be Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital decade — with emerging technologies set to significantly accelerate the continent’s development. For the first time, over half the population will have access to the Internet,while artificial intelligence alone could contribute $30 billion to the economy of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The opportunity is huge, but it can only be realized when everyone is included. Google’s mission to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful could not be more relevant than in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This week I’m delighted to be in Nigeria and Kenya, seeing this digital progress in person and meeting some of the NGOs, entrepreneurs, Googlers, developers and businesses making tech that not only benefits their communities but the world.
To kick off the trip, I’m delighted to be making two announcements that will help build a digital transformation that includes everyone.
Introducing 15 more African languages across Voice Search, talk-to-type on Gboard and Google Translate dictation
Voice technology is empowering individuals to interact with the web and communicate with their friends and family in the way that comes most naturally to them — their voice. Today, we announced the launch of 15 more African languages across Voice Search, talk-to-type on Gboard and dictation on Translate.
Last week, I caught up with Daan van Esch, Technical Program Manager on the program. He told me that the update — built by Google Speech with the Research team in Accra — will enable around 300 million more Africans to use their voice to interact with the web.
This progress is a result of advances in AI, specifically multilingual speech recognition, which converts speech into text. The AI model learns languages in the way a child would, associating speech sounds with sequences of characters in written form. Speech recognition models are trained on data from multiple languages to transcribe speech into text in any of those languages.
Google already supports typing with custom keyboards in Gboard for around 200 African languages, and automatic translation in Translate for over 60 languages spoken in Africa.
Voice input has now been extended to 12 more languages on Gboard and Voice Search — bringing the total number up to 25. And on Translate, we’re extending voice input to 13 more languages, bringing the total to 22.
The new languages on Voice Search and Gboard talk-to-type are Chichewa, Hausa, Igbo, Kikuyu, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Rundi, Shona, Somali, Tigrinya, Twi and Yoruba. On Translate, Chichewa, Hausa, Igbo, Oromo, Rundi, Shona, Somali, South Ndebele, Swati, Tigrinya, Tswana, Twi and Yoruba are now available for voice input.
A $5.8 million commitment towards AI skilling and education
To help unlock the benefits of the digital economy to everyone, today we also announced a further $5.8 million commitment by Google.org to support AI skilling and education across Sub-Saharan Africa.
The funding will go towards equipping workers and students with foundational AI and cybersecurity skills, and supporting nonprofit leaders and the public sector with foundational AI skills.
Recipients of the funding include the Data Scientists Network Foundation, who will be provided with a $1.5 million grant to create a program that trains unemployed and at risk Nigerians in digital and tech training — with the long-term goal of building advanced skills in data and AI. As part of the program, Raspberry Pi Foundation will work with Young Scientists Kenya and Data Scientists Network Foundation to roll out AI literacy education for Kenyan and Nigerian youth.
This new funding builds on the $20 million of Google.org support for organizations helping Africans develop digital skills from Google's economic opportunity initiative. In addition, Grow with Google, which is separate from Google.org, trained over 6.5 million people across Africa in 2023 alone in digital skills to help them build their career or business.
Google is focused on supporting the continent to unlock the benefits of the digital economy to everyone. I’m excited to see how these commitments further that — enabling more people to learn digital skills and surf the web in the way that comes most naturally to them.
