Orange announced on Tuesday it is partnering with OpenAI and Meta to fine-tune AI large language models (LLMs) to incorporate regional languages in Africa that are currently not understood by any GenAI model.
The initiative will initially focus on two regional languages in West Africa: Wolof, which spoken by 16 million people, and Pulaar, which is spoken by six million people.
Under the partnership deals, Orange, OpenAI and Meta will train OpenAI’s Whisper speech model and Meta’s Llama 3.1 text model with diverse examples of these languages to help them better understand them.
The initial objective is to enable customers to communicate with Orange in their local languages for customer support and sales. However, Orange also plans to distribute the resulting open-source AI models via a free license for non-commercial use cases such as public health and public education, among others. It will also collaborate with local startups and other technology companies to use the models to drive AI innovation in those regional languages.
Orange describes the initiative as a blueprint for how AI can be used to promote digital inclusion – particularly for illiterate populations – by making AI and other related advances accessible to everyone.
Orange said its long-term goal is to work with multiple AI technology providers to enable future models to recognize all African languages spoken and written across Orange’s 18-country footprint in Africa.
Separately, Orange also signed a deal with OpenAI to gain direct access to OpenAI’s models, available for the first time in Europe with data processing and hosting in European data centres.
That deal would not only enable Orange to work on improving existing solutions across its footprint, but also give the telco group early access to OpenAI’s latest and most advanced AI models. Orange sees AI-based voice interactions with its customers as an early key use case.
