Orange partners with OpenAI, Meta to develop custom African-language AI models

French telecoms giant Orange on Tuesday said it's partnering with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Facebook-owner Meta to build custom artificial intelligence models designed to better understand regional African languages.

Orange said it's working with OpenAI and Meta to develop custom AI models built on their respective Whisper and Llama open-source AI models — openly available systems that can be adapted to meet specific needs — that can understand West African languages not understood by most conversational systems.

Currently, much of the data major AI companies train their algorithms on originates in the United States, which means their models can lose important context, such as culture and language, when it comes to different regions like Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

That means it can be hard for those models to understand text and voice-based communications composed in less well-represented languages, according to Steve Jarrett, Orange's chief AI officer.

"Having an open model, you're able to do what's called fine tuning, where you you introduce additional information to the model that wasn't included when it was first trained," Jarrett told CNBC in an interview. "We're adding the recognition of West African regional languages that are not understood today by any AI."

Orange plans to start by rolling out AI models that incorporate two West African regional languages, Wolof and Pulaar, which are spoken by roughly 16 million people and six million people, respectively, in early 2025.

Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia and southern Mauritania, while Pulaar is mostly spoken in Senegal.

The open-source AI models will be provided externally by Orange with a free license for non-commercial uses including public