Sunbird AI

Practical AI for social good.

Overview

Sunbird AI is a non-profit research organization in Kampala, Uganda. We build and deploy practical AI systems for African contexts across speech/language; geospatial & environmental sensing; and public-sector decision support, with public agencies, SMEs, and community partners.

Mission

Build reliable, locally relevant AI systems for African use cases that serve public institutions, researchers, and developers for clear societal benefit.

Approach

Work with NGOs, universities, public agencies, SMEs, and community groups to solve challenges where AI is the right solution.
Prioritize datasets, benchmarks, and tooling for under-resourced languages and domains.
Ship code, models, and documentation that are reproducible and maintainable.
When possible, release models and data under permissive licenses with clear data provenance.

Focus Areas

Language & Speech: ASR, TTS, translation, and language models for African languages; paired with datasets and evaluation suites.
Geospatial & Environment: Remote sensing pipelines, urban growth and electrification mapping, biodiversity acoustics, and environmental monitoring.
Evidence informed Decision Support: Tools that help public institutions analyze feedback, plan services, and monitor programs.
Data Infrastructure: Curated corpora, annotation guidelines, and evaluation sets to support the above areas.

Openness & Responsible Use

We publish artifacts that can be audited and reproduced. Each release includes intended use, limitations, and, where applicable, data collection notes and licensing. Users are responsible for complying with local laws, data protection rules, and ethical review processes.

Known Limitations

Models and datasets may underperform outside their documented languages, regions, or domains. Biases may exist due to data coverage. Always validate for your setting before deployment in high-stakes contexts.

Get Involved

Citation

If you use our models or datasets, please cite the relevant repository or preprint.