South Africa Uses AI Technology To Strengthen Key Sectors

South Africa aims to enhance the country's major sectors with help of self-designed and self-managed Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Mondli Gungubele launched the Artificial Intelligence Institute of South Africa (AIISA) in partnership with the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) and the University of Johannesburg.

The institute will focus on solving the country's leading economic problems involving manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture and food processing, as per multiple reports.

Professor Tinyiko Maluleke, Vice Chancellor and Principal of TUT, called the institute's launch a digital revolution for South Africa.

"The work of the Artificial Intelligence Institute of South Africa is to bend the arc of the digital universe in favor of South Africa," Maluleke said, as per the government's official website. "This way, South Africa will stop becoming a consumer and a victim of solutions and algorithms conceptualized elsewhere. Instead, South Africa will become the author and shaper of its own digital destiny."

TUT is also involved in several AI projects in collaboration with the government, including AI Capacity Building for Public Servants, AI Motor Industry Infrastructure Enhancement Programme, Modernising Public Services and AI in Farming and Food Production.

AIISA isn't the only AI-based project that has been launched this year. Africa-centric AI research & product lab, Lelapa, is working on developing AI solutions for the country.

Chief executive Pelonomi Moiloa, who launched the lab, said Lelapa "is one in which AI helps people to solve contemporary challenges," adding that "language is an important component of gaining trust and understanding," MG reported.

Lelapa launched a product named VulaVula, which provides digital support for under-represented languages. Moiloa explained AI helps to create solutions that are safer and "solutions that require limited resources due to cost or because the resources do not exist, like data."

"It does so by providing NLP-as-a-service for multiple languages and for particular focus domains," the company's official website said. "Features include multilingual NER, intent detection, transcription, and translation."

Deep Learning Indaba is another AI company that was formed in 2017 with the mission to ensure that Africans are not only "observers and receivers of the ongoing advances in AI, but active shapers and owners of these technological advances."

Considering the growing and newly launched AI-based companies, it seems that Africa's AI ecosystem will rapidly expand in the coming years.