In the third of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome Kathleen Siminyu, who is building Kiswahili voice tools at Mozilla. We had a great discussion with Kathleen about creating more diverse voice and language datasets, involving local language communities in NLP work, and expanding grassroots ML/AI efforts across Africa.
Aug 25
Postgres at PlanetScale (Changelog Interviews #684)
Sam Lambert is back after 4 years and he does not hold back! We cover $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the Neki "do-over" of Vitess, agents shipping schema changes through deploy requests, rolling back a 500TB table in seconds, and the very real question of whether to open source any of ... Show More
1h 42m
May 2021
The first African voice assistant
Speech smart assistants currently do not support any African language, but now Mozilla’s Common Voice project is building a dataset for Kiswahili which is spoken by more than a 100 million people in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan. They have just been aw ... Show More
38m 43s
Dec 2023
Episode 174 - Live and In Person at Voice+AI 2023
<p>Join Allen Firstenberg and guest host Noble Ackerson, at the Voice and AI 2023 conference. They discuss the growth of AI and how LLM (large language models) are affecting the tech world and delve deep into topics like LangChain, generative AI, and how to optimize AI operations ... Show More
37m 48s
Jun 2023
AI trends: a Latent Space crossover
Daniel had the chance to sit down with @swyx and Alessio from the Latent Space pod in SF to talk about current AI trends and to highlight some key learnings from past episodes. The discussion covers open access LLMs, smol models, model controls, prompt engineering, and LLMOps. Th ... Show More
59m 39s
Jul 2023
2451: How LingQ is Expanding Language Horizons With Tech
In today's episode of Tech Talks Daily, we are joined by Mark Kaufmann, the CEO of LingQ, an innovative language-learning app. LingQ has recently made headlines for announcing the addition of Swahili to their extensive catalogue of languages, raising their total to 42 languages o ... Show More
30m 21s
Dec 2021
Technology as a force for good
Here’s a bonus episode this week from our friends behind Me, Myself, and AI — a podcast on artificial intelligence and business, and produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. We partnered with them to help promote their awesome podcast.We hand picked th ... Show More
25m 36s
Oct 2024
Beyond the Bingo Card: Leadership Lessons with Karen Catlin
In this episode of Front End Happy Hour, we’re joined by Karen to dive into an essential conversation about allyship and inclusion in the tech industry. We discuss what it means to actively support underrepresented groups, the challenges of fostering genuine inclusivity, and prac ... Show More
52m 8s
Oct 2020
Decolonizing AI with Shakir Mohamed - #418
In this special #TWIMLfest edition of the podcast, we’re joined by Shakir Mohamed, a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind.
Shakir is also a leader of Deep Learning Indaba, a non-profit organization whose mission is to Strengthen African Machine Learning and Artificial Intellige ... Show More
54m 3s
Nov 2024
Clones, commerce & campaigns
Chris and Daniel dive into what Trump’s impending second term could mean for AI companies, model developers, and regulators, unpacking the potential shifts in policy and innovation. Next, they discuss the latest models, like Qwen, that blur the performance gap between open and cl ... Show More
53m 11s