In the third of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome Kathleen Siminyu, who is building Kiswahili voice tools at Mozilla. We had a great discussion with Kathleen about creating more diverse voice and language datasets, involving local language communities in NLP work, and expanding grassroots ML/AI efforts across Africa.

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Featuring:

• Kathleen Siminyu – Twitter, LinkedIn
• Chris Benson – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Daniel Whitenack – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Joyce Nabende – Twitter

Show Notes:

• “Introducing myself” from Kathleen
• Masakhane
• Common Voice
• Open for Good Alliance

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!