Building Language Models for the African Context with Lelapa AI | Mbali Ndandani

In this episode, Nathi Mcetywa interviews Mbali Ndandani from Lelapa AI about language models that work in the African context. They discuss the lack of representation of African languages in digital spaces and the importance of solving the language problem for digital inclusion. Mbali explains how Lelapa AI builds language models for low-resource languages and addresses code-switching and compute power limitations. They also talk about the responsible AI framework developed by Lelapa AI to ensure diversity and avoid biases in language models. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the VulaVula app and the invitation for businesses to use the VulaVula API to make their platforms multilingual.