# Welcome to the Mbaza NLP Community!

We are a community working on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Kinyarwanda and other low-resource languages. For example, we are working on Kinyarwanda automatic speech recognition (ASR, also known as Speech-to-Text, STT), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and semantic chatbots.

The code, models and datasets will be shared soon on [GitHub](https://github.com/MBAZA-NLP) and/or [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/mbazaNLP).

| Vision | Mission |
| ------ | ------- |
| Sustainable community rooted in partnership, extending on pre-existing open packages to create inclusive NLP solutions for Kinyarwanda and other low-resource languages | Foster the use of NLP and AI, to implement innovative use cases in Rwanda and the East Africa region |

## What's in it for me?
![why_join](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/46764284/170695647-28751848-ca20-4627-8f78-108f71221ff4.png)

## How to get started
First of all, [join our Slack channel](https://join.slack.com/t/mbazanlpcommunity/shared_invite/zt-2avmqol0n-VQ~5etC0NiVUaVq1kbAOcg) or our [WhatsApp Channel](https://chat.whatsapp.com/BRlxzsFiZgsLmK5SBT2XUo)!

There, you will find information on our activities, such as the next meetup, as well as support if you have any questions.

Also, we invite you to start hacking - fork our [repositories](https://github.com/MBAZA-NLP), play with our [models](https://huggingface.co/mbazaNLP), or download our [datasets](https://huggingface.co/mbazaNLP).

## Background information
The community builds on the technology developed for the [Mbaza COVID-19 Chatbot](https://digicenter.rw/achieving-information-access-equity-using-ai-in-the-fight-against-corona/) by a consortium of partners including GIZ, Digital Umuganda, Arxia, Mozilla and RISA. This technology is now made freely available to the community to continue the development on the technology and to use it for exciting new use cases.