Giving AI a Nigerian Accent: Inside First Local-Language Model
By Shuaib S. Agaka
For millions of Nigerians, digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google remain outsiders to daily life. They stumble over names, flatten accents, and mispronounce places with comic clumsiness-"Enugu" becomes "En-you-goo" and "Ibadan" mutates into "Eye-bay-dawn." Beneath the humor lies a deeper frustration: global technologies still struggle to understand African voices.
That may be about to change. At the 80th United Nations General Assembly, Nigeria unveiled N-ATLAS, the country's first AI model trained specifically to understand local languages, accents, and contexts. More than just a tool, N-ATLAS promises to give 200 million people a digital assistant that finally 'speaks home."
