5 comments

  • someperson 11 minutes ago
    Sounds like your project is for southern American English presumably including African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and for regional accents in the African continent specifically for the English language.

    But tangentially related, for non-English languages of the African continent, the Gates Foundation are pledging some grants to improve AI access outside of English-speaking regions: https://news.bpdata.com/article/gates-foundation-pledges-1-b...

    Despite being focused on English, your project could be of interest for their funding. It's probably worth reaching out to let them know about your work.

  • fractorial 36 minutes ago
    Seeing Atlanna inspire an open weight model was not on my 2026 bingo card.
  • trollbridge 36 minutes ago
    Regional African English accents, so Nigerian, Kenyan, South African?
  • alephnerd 12 minutes ago
    Wow this is really cool. AAVE and Southern lexes have been underserved linguistically for a long time.

    That said, my hunch is your Africa speicifc datasets might lossy, as entire regions of Africa are very linguistically diverse and someone who speaks Bambara and French will affect a different English accent than someone who speaks Maninka and English.

  • likoya 17 hours ago
    Southern American? It's Argentine or Chilean?