Written by Alyssa Boularès for Multilingual.
Every year, more of daily life moves onto AI-powered platforms. Health information, weather alerts, or refugee assistance, for example, now run through digital channels. Used well, this technology can make data processing faster, workflows more effective and information more accessible. But if its development continues as it is, these tools and services may only remain exclusive to a fraction of humanity.
These tools still mainly operate in a small number of high-impact languages. Roughly 4 billion people speak languages that barely register in the systems shaping their future. Little or no written information exists in those languages. Essential resources, such as voice data, which are needed to develop new tools, are also practically non-existent in low-resource languages. Without them, developing relevant and useful tech tools is near impossible. For speakers of these marginalized languages, the AI boom, far from supporting progress, is leaving them further behind, as it widens the gap between them and speakers of the most widely used languages.
Originally published by Multilingual. Read the full the piece here.
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