Sunday, September 21, 2025 - The Federal Government has unveiled N-ATLAS, an open-source, multilingual and multimodal large language model that supports Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English.
Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy,
Dr Bosun Tijani, who announced this in a statement on his X account on
Saturday, stated that the artificial intelligence was launched on the sidelines
of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York.
According to the minister, N-ATLAS is developed to put
African voices at the centre of AI development.
He said, “Starting with Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and
Nigerian-accented English, N-ATLAS places Africa’s voices and diversity at the
foundation of AI.
“This is the first step in a broader journey to make Africa
a contributor and leader in shaping AI’s future.”
According to the product description on its model card,
N-ATLaS LLM features a speech-technology suite that includes language-specific
automatic speech recognition models, which aid in transcription, accessibility,
and local-language applications.
It can be used to build chatbots that answer citizen
questions about government services in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba or Nigerian-accented
English.
The ASR models can transcribe radio, TV or online videos
into text and generate captions/subtitles in the four local languages.
Call-centre and voice assistant support can deploy ASR and
LLM pipelines to capture caller speech in Nigerian accents, transcribe it and
supply intent detection or automated replies.
The model can also be used to summarise interviews conducted
in local languages.
The product was built by the National Centre for Artificial
Intelligence and Robotics and partners, including Awarri Technologies, as part
of Nigeria’s language-AI initiative.
The model documentation can be accessed on Hugging Face.
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