AI models for African languages
Does it actually work for Wolof, Bambara, Lingala or Darija? Benchmarks rarely say. The community tests these models on real speech and text — and reports back.
nllb-600M-moore-lora-v0
Rekin226 / Mooré-Voice
Mooré-French/English translation (~205k pairs).
whisper-tunisian-dialect
TuniSpeech-AI
Tunisian Arabic ASR (~21h LoRA).
Darija ASR (57h, WER 8.5%).
Terjman-Ultra-v2.0
AtlasIA
English to Darija translation (NLLB-1.3B tune).
DarijaBERT
SI2M Lab INSEA + AIOX Labs
BERT model for Moroccan Darija (~100M tokens).
wolofToFrenchTranslator_nllb
GalsenAI (Senegal)
Wolof-French translator (BLEU 13).
AfroLM
B. Dossou et al.
Masked language model covering 23 languages.
AfriBERTa-large
Castorini (Ogueji et al.)
Masked language model; Swahili plus 10 other languages.
AfroXLMR-large-76L
Davlan (D. Adelani et al.)
Masked language model covering Wolof, Bambara, Lingala, Swahili, French and Arabic variants.
MasakhaNER (afroxlmr-large-ner)
Masakhane
Named-entity recognition covering 21 African languages.
Google Cloud Translation
Lingala, Bambara and Swahili via API; Wolof and Fon in the consumer app since June 2024.
Whisper large-v3
OpenAI
Supports Swahili, Lingala and Arabic (no Wolof/Bambara).
NLLB-200
Meta AI