When Abdoulaye Diack, program manager at Google Research, a division of Google dedicated to advancing the state of the art in computer science and applying those breakthroughs to real-world problems, talks about the origins of WAXAL, an open-source speech dataset from Google Research Africa, he begins with a single word.
“WAXAL means ‘speaking,’” he told TechCabal, noting its roots in Wolof, a widely spoken language in the Senegambia region.
The name, chosen in 2020 by a Senegalese research lead at Google, Moustapha Cisse, reflects a larger truth about Africa’s AI trajectory: on a continent with more than 2,000 languages, most of them spoken rather than written, voice is not optional; it is the entry point.
Read More https://techcabal.com/2026/02/12/voice-is-africas-gateway-to-ai-and-google-wants-to-lead-it/.
