The African Next Voices Workshop

"AFRICA NEXT VOICES: Pilot Data Collection in Kenya" is a one year pilot project funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) aiming at data collection through the KenCorpus consortium of Universities with work distributed as follows: Maseno University: Dholuo and Somali, USIU: Maasai, Kabarak University: Kalenjin, Dedan Kimathi (DeKut) and LDRI: Kikuyu.

The purpose of the project is to support the establishment of a corpus of text and voice data for several local languages spoken in Kenya. The one year goal of the project is to collect voice data for 5 Kenyan languages: Dholuo, Gikuyu, Somali, Kalenjin (Nandi/Kipsigis dialects), Maasai.

The one day workshop has brought together Language Leads, Resource Persons and Technical experts.

Dr. Lilian Wanzare ,School of Computing & Informatics-Maseno University as the Principal Investigator of the Project giving her remarks on project overview and objectives

Prof. Collins Ouma, Director Directorate of Research & Innovation- Maseno University giving his Keynote address on: Role of Under-resourced languages in development of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence