The Federal Government has launched N-ATLAS, an open-source artificial intelligence model designed to support Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English.
Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, announced the initiative in New York on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly. He said the multilingual and multimodal large language model was developed to place African voices at the centre of global AI innovation.
“This is the first step in a broader journey to make Africa a contributor and leader in shaping AI’s future,” Tijani wrote on X.
Developed by the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in partnership with Awarri Technologies, N-ATLAS features speech recognition tools for transcription, accessibility and local-language applications.
The model can be deployed for chatbots that answer citizen queries, transcription of broadcast content, automated call-centre support, and subtitles in local languages. It can also summarise interviews conducted in indigenous tongues.
The project forms part of Nigeria’s wider language-AI initiative. Model documentation is hosted on the open-source platform Hugging Face.
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