• Telco Orange says it is working closely with Meta and OpenAI to fine-tune each company’s AI to better understand African languages.
• Orange says its end goal is for these latest AI models to understand all the languages in each of its 18 African markets.
• Concerns arise that Africans will be left out of the benefits of AI while simultaneously suffering the worst of the technology.

In potentially a landmark announcement, one of Africa’s biggest telecoms Orange, says it has partnered with Instagram-owner Meta and ChatGPT-owner OpenAI to expand the capabilities of their AI models to “understand regional languages in Africa.”

Orange says major AI large language models (LLMs) do not understand many different languages in Africa, and if they do, they don’t have as good a grasp on them as Western languages because of developer bias.

In an announcement, Orange describes how the three companies will together “develop custom AI models capable of allowing customers to communicate naturally in their local languages with Orange for customer support and sales.”

The telecom says it has plans to make these AI models free, provided with a license at no cost for non-commercial use in public health, education and other services.

“Orange intends to help drive AI innovation in these regional languages including by collaborating on these new AI models with local startups and other technology companies, and by doing so, to mitigate the growing digital divide faced by people all across the African continent,” it explains in an announcement.

It will begin with incorporating languages endemic to West Africa in the first half of 2025. Namely, Wolof and Pulaar, which are spoken by 16 million and six million Africans respectively. The telecom explains it its long-term goal is to work with AI technology providers to have “all African languages spoken and written across Orange’s 18-country footprint” recognised by their AI models.

“By fine-tuning leading AI models such as OpenAI’s ‘Whisper’ speech model and Meta’s ‘Llama’ text model with diverse examples of these languages, we will enable them to better understand these regional languages.”

Orange recently signed a deal with OpenAI to have direct access to its AI models, those powering popular software like ChatGPT.

“This new partnership will also facilitate early access to OpenAI’s latest and most advanced AI models, enabling the realization of other key use cases such as AI-based voice interactions with Orange customers,” the telecom explains.

One of the biggest concerns around AI is that African countries are excluded from the benefits of the technology, while simultaneously suffering the drawbacks of AI, like the fading away of certain office jobs, for example.

Africans are meeting this concern head-on, and the first way to increase the use of this software is to add more languages to their knowledge bases. West Africa seems to be at the forefront of this. Developers at Nigeria’s HoleyFox have used OpenAI’s API to create an AI assistant that can understand languages in Nigeria – Kainene vos Savant.

It was seeing 11 000 conversations per hour as of March 2023.