May 28-30, 2024

‘Longa, let’s talk’: reflections on the co-design of an automated speech recognition tool for low-resource and Bantu languages

2023-11-09T13:00:00-06:00

ICTforAg 2023

This talk reports on the progress of the development and testing of an automated speech recognition tool. The project is in collaboration with Farm Radio International, an NGO broadcasting valuable knowledge to farmers across Africa., via local radio networks. Farmers are able to call in and leave comments or ask questions, however, without the capacity to transcribe and translate them, many calls go unanswered. Longa is thus a tool, built using the latest in natural language processing software, which can analyze and aggregate these calls, with the intention of better tailoring radio shows to farmers. We are currently field-testing the model and exploring the onboarding process. The speakers present lessons learned thus far for organizations wishing to explore their own audio analytics strategy.