Do Africans Want Chatbots? — Reflections from AfriCHI 2025

Do Africans Want Chatbots?

At the AfriCHI 2025 conference, our group lead Prof. Vukosi Marivate delivered a keynote that brought the AI and HCI worlds into powerful conversation, asking a provocative question:

Do Africans really want chatbots?

The talk explored how Africa’s technology future depends on bridging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), bringing together the people who build intelligent systems and the designers who make them human.

🌍 Why This Question Matters

While large language models and generative AI continue to dominate the global agenda, most systems are built far from the contexts where they are used.
African users interact daily with technologies that don’t understand their languages, cultures, or values.

Prof. Marivate reminded us that AI cannot succeed in Africa if it remains detached from human realities. Machine learning often assumes ideal users and perfect data, but African contexts are multilingual, complex, and grounded in lived experience.
HCI brings the tools to bridge that gap — empathy, co-design, participation, and social grounding.

🧠 Our Work: Building Bridges Through Research

At DSFSI, we’re making this connection real through research and collaboration:

• 💬 Multilingual NLP for African Languages – advancing models that adapt to low-resource settings.
• 🎙️ ZA–African Next Voices Project – collecting 3,000+ hours of speech data across 7 South African languages.
• 📚 Digitisation Playbooks – practical guides for building datasets and community capacity in African languages.
• ⚖️ Ethical Dataset Licensing – in partnership with legal scholars, developing frameworks for equitable data use.
• 🤝 Collaborative Ecosystems – partnering with Masakhane, AfriDSAI, and the Deep Learning Indaba to grow open, participatory AI for Africa.

These initiatives show that AI and HCI are stronger together — that technical progress must be matched with human insight, usability, and ethics.

💡 Beyond Chatbots: Toward Human Technologies

Prof. Marivate’s keynote called for “activism through design” — a new mindset where building technology becomes an act of care. AI in Africa must be participatory, trustworthy, and rooted in Ubuntu — the idea that our technologies, like our societies, are defined by our relationships with one another.

“AI won’t thrive in Africa without HCI — without systems that are trustworthy, usable, and socially grounded. The future belongs to technologies that don’t just speak for Africa, but with Africa.”

✨ Call to Action

If you’re a designer, researcher, linguist, or technologist, we invite you to join us.
Help us bridge the gap between AI and HCI, between data and design, between innovation and inclusion.

Together, we can build AI that listens before it speaks — and that reflects the voices, languages, and values of a diverse continent.