Orange Commits to AI Expansion Across African Languages
Leading telco Orange is eager to expand its open-source AI models to regional languages across the African continent to improve digital inclusion.
Orange’s vision is to make AI and other related advances accessible to all, which includes populations that are illiterate and as a result are currently unable to benefit from the possible potentials that AI can offer. The company seeks to accelerate digital equalities across Africa by incorporating regional languages into its AI large language models (LLMs) for the first time.
The first languages to be rolled out in 2025 are Wolof and Pulaar, which are spoken by 16 million people and six million people, respectively, across West Africa.
Orange will fine-tune OpenAI’s open-source speech models and Meta’s openly available Llama 3.1 to support these languages, whilst advocating for responsible AI use worldwide.
Committing to digital inclusion
Orange is seeking to provide fine tuned AI models in open-source for non-commercial use, purely to support local communities across Africa. The company states that it is committed to playing a key role in the development of responsible AI across Africa, whilst also promoting open-source AI in Europe.
“This approach means only using the latest LLMs where they are necessary and otherwise choosing simpler and cheaper solutions, thereby minimising the impact on the environment as well as reducing cost for the many valuable AI use cases deployed across Orange,” the company said via its announcement.
“Orange also is playing a key role in the development of a vibrant European AI ecosystem with their promotion of open-source AI projects with the goal of making AI affordably accessible for all.”
Orange has been working across Africa for a number of years. Its goal as a telco is to provide greater digital services and mobile connectivity for the people living there, whilst also promoting digital, financial and energy inclusion.
In ensuring that its services are providing concrete solutions to serve people’s needs, the company partnered with companies like Mastercard in 2024 to offer affordable, reliable and accessible financial solutions to individuals who were previously excluded from formal financial systems.
- In 2023, Orange Middle East and Africa (OMEA) generated €7 billion (US$7.37bn) in revenue, whilst serving more than 149 million customers.
As part of Orange’s commitment to digital inclusion and focus on driving growth in the Middle East and Africa, the telco is partnering with OpenAI and Meta to fine-tune AI, enabling it to understand regional languages in Africa that today are not currently understood by any other generative AI (Gen AI) model.
The project aims to develop custom AI models capable of allowing customers to communicate naturally in their local languages with Orange for customer support and sales. These AI models will be provided externally by Orange with a free license for non-commercial use such as for public health, public education and many other services.
Advancing responsible AI
Orange is eager for this project to eventually expand to the 3,000-plus languages spoken across Africa and the Middle East - potentially revolutionising communication in regions where traditional AI models are falling short.
Orange intends to help drive AI innovation in these regional languages further by collaborating on these new AI models with local startups and other technology companies, and by doing so, hopefully mitigate the growing digital divide faced by people all across the African continent.
By fine-tuning leading AI models such as OpenAI’s ‘Whisper’ speech model and Meta’s ‘Llama’ text model with diverse examples of these languages, Orange states it will “enable them to better understand these regional languages”.
Orange is not the first telco to expand its services across Africa. Other leading companies within the sector such as Nokia are also committing to enhance rural connectivity and improve its digital offerings to better support its customers.
Africa’s wider telecom sector is increasingly becoming attune to digital transformation in the form of AI adoption. This project may set a benchmark for how AI can serve the region even more, whilst supporting both business needs and technology equalities.
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