In a country such as Senegal, where about 50% of the population is illiterate, technologies and applications that are designed to be used by people who can read are not as effective as they could be. In this competition, your aim is to use Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques in the Wolof language to help illiterate people to interact with apps with just their voice, in a language they can already speak.

The challenge will focus on a public transport use case for two reasons. First, many users of public transport can’t read or speak French, so they can’t interact with existing apps that help passengers to find a bus for a given destination. And second, there is already an existing app in Senegal, WeeGo, which helps passengers to get transport information.

The goal of this competition is to build an ASR model that will help illiterate people use existing apps to find which bus they can take to reach their destination, without having to know how to read or write.

About Baamtu Datamation (baamtu.com)

Baamtu Datamation is a Senegalese company focused on helping companies to leverage AI and Big Data.

About AI4D-Africa; Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (ai4d.ai)

AI4D-Africa is a network of excellence in AI in sub-Saharan Africa. It is aimed at strengthening and developing community, scientific and technological excellence in a range of AI-related areas. It is composed of African Artificial Intelligence researchers, practitioners and policymakers.

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