Building the foundations of Somali AI
We build open datasets, language and speech models, benchmarks, and research that help AI understand Somali. Everything we can open, we do.
Language technology decides who gets to participate
When AI doesn't understand a language, its speakers are left out of the tools shaping education, work, and public life. Closing that gap for Somali is the point of everything we build.
Education
Students can learn AI and build with technology in their own language, instead of only in English.
Research
Open Somali data and benchmarks let researchers study a low-resource language rigorously and reproducibly.
Accessibility
Speech models bring reading, writing, and search to millions who communicate mainly by voice.
Digital inclusion
As daily life moves online, Somali speakers deserve tools that understand how they actually speak and write.
From raw data to open models in three steps
Collect & annotate
Community contributors, radio archives, and web crawls feed raw Somali text and speech into our pipeline. Every source is documented and licensed.
Clean, align & train
Data is deduplicated, filtered for quality, and used to train tokenizers, ASR models, and language models — benchmarked against SomBench.
Release in the open
Datasets, model checkpoints, evaluation code, and research notes are published under permissive licenses for anyone to use, study, and improve.
The foundations of Somali AI
We build the layers others build on — data first, then models, benchmarks, and research, with education woven through.
New from the lab
Jul 2026
Soplang v2.0.0
A compiler for the first Somali programming language — native Somali keywords, a Cranelift JIT, and ahead-of-time native builds.
Jun 2026
SomNLP-Corpus v2
Expanded to 887M+ tokens with a six-source cleaning pipeline and LID verification.
May 2026
whisper-som-small (ASR)
A Somali speech-to-text checkpoint reaching 11.4% WER on held-out radio audio.
Nov 2025
Tokenization for Somali morphology
A study of subword strategies for an agglutinative, low-resource language.
Mar 2026
SomBench v0.1 evaluation suite
A first public benchmark for Somali NLP across six core tasks.
Q3 2026
Somali TTS voice (preview)
Natural Somali speech synthesis, opening for early research access.
Build it with us
Goobo Labs is a community effort. Whoever you are, there's a way to contribute.
Contribute on GitHubResearchers
Use our datasets and benchmarks, co-author studies, and push low-resource NLP forward.
Developers
Build on open models and tokenizers, file issues, and ship Somali-language features.
Students
Join fellowships and bootcamps to learn ML and contribute to real research.
Contributors
Help collect, transcribe, and verify data — every contribution improves the models.
Stay in the loop
Dataset releases, new bootcamp cohorts, research papers, and lab updates — straight to your inbox. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Build Somali AI in the open
Use our datasets and models, contribute to the research, or partner with the lab. Everything we can open, we do.