Digital and language inclusion can transform lives — here’s how

Up to now, the advances in language technology that lie behind tools like ChatGPT, Alexa, and Google Translate have only worked for speakers of a few dozen languages. But in a wider range of languages, they could dramatically impact the lives of millions of people. They could enable those displaced by war and disasters to access critical information and services in their own languages. 

That is why CLEAR Global is a pioneer and an advocate for the development of language technology for marginalized communities. Working with other language tech experts in Africa and South Asia in particular, we have shown how language technology can be made accessible and useful. 4 billion people worldwide speak marginalized languages for which technology solutions do not yet exist. We are working towards ensuring they have access to essential information, services and conversations.

Advances in technology present radically expanded opportunities to accelerate progress and ensure it benefits speakers of less powerful languages. But investment in language AI remains highly unequal, driven in part by a sense that ‘nothing can be done’ for the 7,000 or so languages currently without functioning language technology.

CLEAR Global does not accept that nothing can be done. We have consistently pushed the boundaries in language technology by showing that much is possible with very marginalized languages. Together with linguists, technologists and civil society in the relevant countries, we have built ground-breaking language technology that challenges those assumptions:

• We have built automatic speech recognition and machine translation for marginalized languages like Kurdish and Tigrinya that outperformed the models available at the time. This initial investment opened the door to building solutions that can help people in humanitarian emergencies get vital information in their own language.
• We deployed an offline information kiosk in Bihar, India that answered farmers’ spoken questions on climate adaptation in their own language. With the right technology they no longer struggled with poor connectivity and low literacy; the information they wanted was available in the audio form that was easiest for them.
• We built chatbots using conversational AI to answer people’s questions on Covid-19 in such neglected languages as Lingala, Congolese Swahili, Hausa and Kanuri. Unlike the menu-based bots commonly deployed during the pandemic, Uji in DRC and Shehu in Nigeria allowed users to put questions in their own words. 
• Chatbot Hajiya, in northeast Nigeria, uses conversational AI to respond to questions in 4 languages: Shuwa Arabic, Hausa, Kanuri and English. That’s not all: it can accommodate the common practice of switching between those languages, understanding for instance when a user drops an English word into a Kanuri sentence. 

The next step is to enable users to engage with our chatbots using speech not text – ensuring that everyone, regardless of background or education, can easily ask questions directly and confidently. To enable that, our latest innovation is TWB Voice. This tool, currently in development,  addresses the gaping shortage of voice data in marginalized languages by providing a platform for collecting the speech data needed to build voice technology for languages like Shuwa Arabic, Hausa and Kanuri.

These innovations have far-reaching practical applications for speakers of the world’s less powerful languages. They hold the potential to even up access to information and services by enabling conversations in the user’s own language. They can make it possible for someone who can’t read or write to raise concerns, hold authorities to account, and contribute their knowledge and insights to national and global conversations. 

Critically, they show that digital language inclusion is possible, and can motivate others to work towards that goal too. So that people can get the information and support they need when they need it, whatever language they speak.