Opportunity International's UlangiziAI Gives Malawian Farmers Advice in Chichewa and English via WhatsApp

Since February 2024, farmers in Malawi have been able to use UlangiziAI, a multimodal chatbot, through WhatsApp on their phones, NVIDIA's technical blog reported in September 2024. It was developed by the NGO Opportunity International, which has worked in Malawi for 21 years, together with the AI workflow platform Gooey.AI. Ulangizi means guidance or counselling in Chichewa, the native language of about half of Malawi's 20 million people. Because smartphone access is low, Opportunity International trains local farmer support agents and gives them smartphones so they can help rural communities use the app. Farmers can send questions as text, voice notes or photographs and receive answers in English or Chichewa, as text or audio, which matters in a country where around 30% of people do not read or write. Voice memos are transcribed and translated into English by a model such as Meta's MMS Large or a fine-tuned version of OpenAI's Whisper 3, and photos of crops or pests are routed to OpenAI's GPT-4o. The combined input is turned into vector database queries against a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline grounded in the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture's Guide to Agriculture Production, a 450-page manual. The retrieved material is passed back to the language model, which translates the answer into English or Chichewa and includes citations and links to the source. Because Chichewa is a low-resource language with little training data, Gooey.AI bootstrapped techniques to optimise the system and regularly swaps in newer open source LLMs and speech recognition models as they improve. UlangiziAI runs on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in the Azure cloud. During an initial three-month pilot the app received more than 4,000 questions in both languages, covering farming practices, crops, livestock, fertilisers, fungicides and disease testing. According to the blog, it has cut the time farmers need to get critical guidance from days to seconds, and users have rated it highly. Opportunity International planned to introduce it in Kenya with Swahili and other Kenyan languages.