Nigeria Launches AI That Speaks Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Pidgin

The Federal Government has unveiled N-ATLAS, an open-source—Artificial Intelligence (AI) multilingual and multimodal large language model designed to support Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian-accented English.

Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, announced the launch in a statement on his official X account on Saturday. The unveiling took place on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York.

According to Tijani, the project was developed to place African voices at the centre of global AI innovation. “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,” the minister said.

The model’s documentation highlights its speech-technology suite, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools tailored to local languages. These tools can be used for transcription, accessibility, and local-language applications. Potential use cases include chatbots that answer questions on government services in local languages, transcribing radio and TV broadcasts, and generating subtitles or captions in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, or Nigerian English.

Call-centre operators and voice assistants can also deploy the ASR and LLM pipelines to transcribe Nigerian-accented speech, detect intent, and generate automated responses. The technology further allows for the summarisation of interviews conducted in local languages.

The development of N-ATLAS was led by the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, in partnership with Awarri Technologies, as part of Nigeria’s wider Language-AI Initiative. The model is now available on the open-source platform Hugging Face.