The Ministry of ICT permanent secretary, Dr Aminah Zawedde on behalf of the Uganda government and Dr. Enest Mwebaze the Executive director of Sunbird Al, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at leveraging artificial intelligence systems to increase the use ICT services for Uganda social and economic development.
The Ministry of ICT permanent secretary explains that with the MoU, the government will be seeking to leverage the use of Artificial intelligence to boost innovation for Job creation but above all take into consideration the unique setup of the country.
The government will tap into Sunbird Al’s flagship project,the Sunbird translate system which is built through an open local language data set of 25000 sentences translated across six commonly spoken languages which are English, Acholi, Ateso ,Luganda, Lugbara and Runyankole to help provide for use by government.
“The system uses state of the art accuracy to translate any comparable dataset. Sunbird developed this to include a range of locally relevant topics for example in health care, agriculture and society. The system is pivoting from it’s original text-to-text format to text-to-speech. A key use case for Sunbird translate includes easing citizen service delivery through ensuring information is easily comprehended by those it is intended to for.” Said Dr. Zawedde.