If you want to fully understand AI , you need to know what is a bot. AI bots are self-learning complex programs that are programmed with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning.
Dossou’s Mom often sends him voice messages in Fon, a Beninese language, when he has left to study in Russia. However, he does not understand some of the sentences she uses.
“My mother doesn’t know how to write Fon and I don’t speak that language very well, but I do speak French fluently,” Dossou said.
“I often ask my sister to help me understand some of the sentences my mother uses,” he said.
There is no question of improving one’s fon by studying because, like hundreds of other African languages, it is mainly spoken and rarely documented, so that there are few, if any, books to teach grammar and syntax.
Driven by curiosity and fueled by data collected on the Fon thanks to a Bible from Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mr. Dossou and Chris Emezue, a Nigerian friend, have developed a model of language translation by artificial intelligence (AI) that Dossou used to read the voice messages of his mom in Fon, It is similar to Google Translate, which they named FFR.
They are still working on improving their invention.The two students are part of several AI researchers who use African languages in natural language processing (NLP), a branch of AI used to teach and help computers understand human languages.
