AI & African Enterprises: January 2024 Newsletter
Newsletter Originally Published January 28, 2024
🥳 AI & Africa in 2024!
We're probably the last to wish you a healthy and prosperous 2024, but we would be remiss to start the first newsletter of 2024 without offering our well wishes!
2023 was a great year for ajala.ai: following our release of market-leading voice recognition products for Nigerian English and Ghanaian English, we followed up with a public beta of Nigerian Pidgin English voice recognition, garnered various bits of media coverage, worked on several products we'll be rolling out throughout 2024, and grew this newsletter's audience by 3x!
Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself...
ajala.ai has been building Voice AI solutions for African languages since we secured our first round of funding in 2017 when global interest in AI (talk less of Africa) was limited. We expanded our Covid-era AI & African Enterprises webinar series into this monthly newsletter and plan to continue to grow our product coverage and newsletter in support of increasing interest in AI in Africa.
New subscribers can read back issues of the newsletter here and learn about our product offering here.
We skipped the December 2023 newsletter because holiday, work overload, etc, so this newsletter condenses African AI news we found interesting over the last two months. 2023 ended with the EU lawmakers agreeing to terms for The AI Act, a seminal piece of legislation which will likely serve as foundational as other regional bodies develop similar regulatory guidelines for managing AI use.
Takeaway: Despite continuing questions about the practical utility of Large Language Models (LLMs), which dominate current "AI" discourse, 2024 looks set to advance the AI future that is slowly becoming reality.
—Team ajala