AI Upskilling Drives Africa's Digital Decade

The next decade is poised to be Sub-Saharan Africa's digital era, with emerging technologies expected to boost the continent's development big time. For the first time, more than half of the population will get online, and artificial intelligence by itself could add a whopping $30 billion to Sub-Saharan Africa's economy.

The potential here is massive, but we'll only tap into it if everyone's included. Google's goal to make the world's info accessible and useful is super relevant in Sub-Saharan Africa right now.

This week, I'm thrilled to be in Nigeria and Kenya, checking out this digital progress firsthand and meeting the NGOs, entrepreneurs, Googlers, developers, and businesses who are creating tech that not only helps their communities but the whole world.

To start off my trip, I'm excited to announce two initiatives that will help drive a digital transformation that leaves no one behind.

Introducing 15 More African Languages Across Voice Search, Talk-to-Type on Gboard, and Google Translate Dictation

Voice tech is empowering folks to connect with the web and chat with friends and family in the most natural way possible — using their voice. Today, we're rolling out 15 more African languages across Voice Search, talk-to-type on Gboard, and dictation on Translate.

Last week, I chatted with Daan van Esch, the Technical Program Manager on this project. He told me the update, crafted by Google Speech with the Research team in Accra, will let around 300 million more Africans use their voice to surf the web.

This progress comes from advances in AI, particularly in multilingual speech recognition, which turns speech into text. The AI model learns languages like a kid does, linking speech sounds to written characters. Speech recognition models are trained on data from multiple languages to transcribe speech into text in any of those languages.

Google already supports typing with custom keyboards in Gboard for about 200 African languages, and automatic translation in Translate for over 60 languages spoken in Africa.

Voice input has now been expanded to 12 more languages on Gboard and Voice Search — bringing the total to 25. And on Translate, we're adding voice input to 13 more languages, making it 22 in total.

The new languages on Voice Search and Gboard talk-to-type include Chichewa, Hausa, Igbo, Kikuyu, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Rundi, Shona, Somali, Tigrinya, Twi, and Yoruba. On Translate, you can now use voice input for Chichewa, Hausa, Igbo, Oromo, Rundi, Shona, Somali, South Ndebele, Swati, Tigrinya, Tswana, Twi, and Yoruba.

A $5.8 Million Commitment Towards AI Skilling and Education

To make sure everyone can benefit from the digital economy, today we also announced a $5.8 million commitment from Google.org to boost AI skilling and education across Sub-Saharan Africa.

This funding will help equip workers and students with basic AI and cybersecurity skills, and support nonprofit leaders and the public sector with foundational AI training.

Some of the funding recipients include the Data Scientists Network Foundation, which will get a $1.5 million grant to launch a program that trains unemployed and at-risk Nigerians in digital and tech skills — aiming to eventually build advanced skills in data and AI. As part of this, the Raspberry Pi Foundation will team up with Young Scientists Kenya and Data Scientists Network Foundation to introduce AI literacy education to Kenyan and Nigerian youth.

This new funding adds to the $20 million Google.org has already given to organizations helping Africans develop digital skills through Google's economic opportunity initiative. Plus, Grow with Google, which is separate from Google.org, trained over 6.5 million people across Africa in 2023 alone, helping them build their careers or businesses with digital skills.

Google is all about helping the continent unlock the digital economy for everyone. I'm excited to see how these commitments will help more people learn digital skills and navigate the web in the way that feels most natural to them.