At the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA80) in New York, Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, unveiled N-ATLAS (Nigeria Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale) — an open-source, multilingual and multimodal large language model crafted to understand and generate text and speech in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian-accented English.
Built in collaboration with Awarri Technologies and backed by Nigeria’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, N-ATLAS is intended to help transcribe radio or TV broadcasts, power voice assistants, build chatbots that speak local languages, and generate captions/subtitles in Nigeria’s major tongues.
Currently, Nigeria’s C-band and L-band satellite services already extend into Kenya, though Ku-band and Ka-band coverage is pending. Officials say N-ATLAS could catalyze demand for localized AI services across Africa, reinforcing Nigeria’s ambition to lead on AI for the continent.
Tijani described the rollout as more than a technical milestone — a “national commitment to unity, inclusion, and global contribution.” He asserted that too many AI systems today exclude local linguistic and cultural realities, and N-ATLAS is meant to shift that balance.
The success of N-ATLAS will hinge on adoption by developers, its performance in noisy and code-switched environments, data privacy safeguards, and whether it can spark a wave of African-centered digital solutions.
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