Translation takes wing with new Sunbird AI model
Uganda-based Sunbird AI is aiming to build an open-source foundation for an African AI developers, and is expanding its language model’s footprint across the continent.
Uganda-based nonprofit AI research organisation Sunbird AI is expanding its Sunflower language model from 31 Ugandan and East African languages to more than 67 languages across Africa. Sunflower V2 introduces a lightweight model that runs on mid-range smartphones, a speech recognition model for 51 African languages and a text-to- speech model for 20 languages. Sunbird's models are built using Qwen 3 and, according to the company, outperform ChatGPT and Gemini 2.5 Pro. The organisation sees the expansion not just as a language-support milestone, but as part of its broader ambition to provide an open foundation that African developers, researchers and organisations can use to build their own AI applications.
Its language work has evolved from a relatively narrow focus on translation, into speech and increasingly capable models that can support multiple languages and tasks.
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