The Federal Government has launched N-ATLAS, a new open-source artificial intelligence model that supports Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian-accented English.
Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, announced the development in a statement on Saturday. He said the model was unveiled in New York on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly.
According to him, N-ATLAS is designed to put African voices at the centre of global AI development.
“Starting with Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English, N-ATLAS places Africa’s voices and diversity at the foundation of AI. This is the first step in a broader journey to make Africa a contributor and leader in shaping AI’s future,” Tijani said.
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The model comes with a speech-technology suite that can transcribe speech, generate subtitles, and make digital services more accessible in Nigerian languages. It can be used to build chatbots that answer questions about government services, provide captions for TV or online videos, and support call centres and voice assistants that respond in Nigerian accents.
It can also summarise interviews conducted in local languages, making it useful for media and research.
N-ATLAS was developed by the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in partnership with Awarri Technologies. The model is part of Nigeria’s language-AI initiative, and its documentation is available on Hugging Face.