By John Ogunsemore
The Federal Government has released N-ATLAS v1, an open-source, multilingual & multimodal large language model that supports Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English.
Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani disclosed this in an X post on Saturday.
He said N-ATLAS v1 was unveiled on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA25) in New York, United States.
“Starting with Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English, N-ATLAS places Africa’s voices and diversity at the foundation of AI,” he stated.
The minister added that the large language model is the first step in a broader journey to make Africa a contributor and leader in shaping AI’s future.
Developed by the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR) in collaboration with local startup Awarri Technologies and other partners, N-ATLAS is fine-tuned from Meta’s Llama-3 8B base model.
The model includes a speech-technology suite with language-specific automatic speech recognition (ASR) capabilities, enabling transcription, captioning, and voice-assisted applications in the supported languages.
Potential applications include chatbots for government services in local tongues, real-time transcription of media content, and voice assistants for call centres handling Nigerian accents.
It can also summarise interviews or generate subtitles for videos in Yoruba, Hausa, or Igbo, enhancing accessibility in education, healthcare, and public services.
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