Chatbots by Africans for Africans: An IITPSA SIGAIR Event, 25 November 2021

Chatbots, Conversational AI, Natural Language Processing: It seems that the technology has made exponential advances over recent years. Many of us use this technology daily in the form of Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and others. The applications in education and healthcare are promising.

A significant challenge with this technology is that almost all platforms are created in northern America or Europe. Indigenous languages are rarely catered for. It is estimated that there are more than 2,000 languages spoken on the African continent. What can we do, and what is being done currently, to address this issue?

Join the IITPSA for a timely and relevant discussion on African language integration in the smart technology era. Join Dr Vukosi Marivate, UP ABSA Chair of Data Science – University of Pretoria, Co-Founder Deep Learning Indaba, Data Science and Natural Language Processing Researcher; Jade Abbott, Machine Learning Lead at Retro Rabbit. Finalist: Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans. NLP Researcher for African Languages at Masakhane and Johan Steyn, IITPSA Chair: Special Interest Group – AI & Robotics Johan Steyn is a technologist and management consultant.

One registered, a link and password to join will be emailed to you. Register HERE.