Build Somali AI together
Researchers, engineers, students, and volunteers building Somali AI together — and how you can join.
The people building it
How the lab is evolving
Goobo Labs founded
Started in Mogadishu with a mission to build open AI infrastructure for the Somali language.
First open corpora released
Published the initial Somali text and speech datasets under permissive licenses.
Talent programs launched
Began fellowships and bootcamps training local engineers in modern ML and NLP.
Models & benchmarks
Released ASR checkpoints, a base tokenizer, the SomBench evaluation suite, and Soplang — a compiler for the first Somali-syntax programming language.
TTS, RAG & partnerships
Somali speech synthesis, retrieval tooling, and regional research collaborations.
Why this work matters
Somali is spoken by more than 20 million people, yet remains largely absent from modern AI. Four gaps stand in the way.
Missing Local Data
High-quality Somali text and speech datasets barely exist, so models trained elsewhere never learn the language well.
Language Barriers
Global models underperform on Somali morphology, dialects, and scripts — leaving most speakers poorly served.
Limited Talent Pool
Few local engineers have hands-on experience with modern ML, slowing the growth of a homegrown AI ecosystem.
Digital Inclusion
Without local infrastructure, millions risk being excluded from the tools reshaping education, health, and work.
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.
Sharafdin Yusuf
Lead Engineer & Researcher
Somali people should not only use AI tools made elsewhere, but also build, shape, and own the systems that reflect their language and culture.
Questions, answered
What the lab is, how our work is licensed, and how to build on it.
Still have questions?
Contact the teamBuild 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.