For years, Sheriff Issaka kept running into the same problem while building language technology for Africa: there was not enough data. The data needed to train systems for African languages was scarce, and much of what was available was not good enough.
That problem changed what African Languages Lab, the AI research and deployment company Issaka founded in 2020, spent its time doing. Instead of building systems only with the available data, the company began collecting the data it could not find.
The company says it has since built the largest collection of African-language data in existence, covering more than 70 languages, including Amharic, Hausa, Zulu, Twi, Igbo, and Yoruba.
On Tuesday, African Languages Lab launched Mansa, a multilingual and multimodal AI platform that puts about 30 of those languages into production. It is available on the web and mobile, with APIs for developers and businesses.
Originally published by TechCabal.