Lesan, a Berlin-based startup, is outperforming Google Translate in Ethiopian languages with its machine translation products. The company, founded in 2019, has developed translation tools for Amharic and Tigrinya that it claims provide higher-quality translations. Lesan's success is attributed to its use of offline print resources, which helped create a new benchmark data set for languages from the Horn of Africa.

In the conversational artificial intelligence (AI) space, Lesan's work is relevant to the boom in tools like ChatGPT. While these tools struggle to provide accurate translations in low-resource languages like Tigrinya and Amharic, Lesan's specific focus on language-specific technologies allows them to overcome this challenge.

The co-founder and CTO of Lesan emphasizes the importance of collaboration within the pan-African AI movement. They believe that African language technology startups can come together and solve language-related problems in their own unique way, rather than relying solely on approaches from Silicon Valley. By leveraging their technical expertise and connection to their respective communities, these startups can make a significant impact in the field of machine translation for African languages.

Read more on Rest Of World