Stewart Kettle | 12 Jun 2024

In our first project with UNICEF in Türkiye, we set up our AI interviews in Turkish. To our surprise, several participants answered in Arabic or English. Fortunately, the magic of AI meant this wasn't a problem: our interviewer understood these replies and asked sensible follow-up questions... but still in Turkish.

This ability to switch language comprehension is amazing itself, but we wanted to really harness these multilingual capabilities. We've now updated our interviewer so that participants can choose a language for the whole conversation. You can try the demos on our homepage in Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Kiswahili, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish (www.colectiv.tech). We can easily switch on another ten languages, and will add more as AI becomes more powerful.

If you were a researcher going into a refugee camp and an interviewer that could speak 20 languages turned up, would you hire them? Using AI solves one of the significant barriers to gathering insights from lots of people: the complexity of the human language landscape. We believe that when used appropriately it will foster greater participation and inclusivity in research. However, it's essential to recognize AI's limitations with certain languages and to plan accordingly.

We're launching our first project in Kiswahili in Tanzania soon (more details to follow) and hope that in future we'll be getting more and more prepared for all this usefulness!