Language and literacy
Pages
Find out how the intended users prefer to communicate, and which ways they can use with ease: typed text, voice calls, voice notes, images or video. Ask, too, where they get information today and through which channels, such as WhatsApp, radio or a trusted person. The answers differ between countries and within them, by town and countryside, gender, class and ethnic group. Voice channels work on basic phones and suit people who cannot read or are uneasy with text. Some people prefer to get information from a person rather than a tool.
Find out how well the AI models a project plans to use work in the users' own languages, in the way they mix languages, and in the modes they use, such as voice. Most language models work best in English and other widely written languages, and have mostly been used through typed text. Speech models are making voice tools more feasible, but many low-resource languages, often mainly spoken, are still poorly covered. A vendor's claim that a language is "supported" says little on its own. Ask for evidence of how quality differs between languages.
The whole bucket as one markdown file: /language-literacy.md
Questions this bucket answers
- E3.1
- Preferred languages
Which languages does the audience prefer to write in, and to speak in?
- E3.2
- Code-switching
In multilingual contexts, when, how and why does the audience mix languages?
- E3.3
- Literacy
How well can the audience read and write, and how does that affect the use case?
- E3.4
- Modality
Which ways of communicating (text, voice, voice notes, video) does the audience prefer and use comfortably?
- E3.5
- Model performance
How well do the proposed language models perform in the audience's languages, code-switching and modalities?