Global data science and AI competition platform Zindi, has partnered with the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre to stage a Caribbean wide AI hackathon, a collaboration that highlights the region’s growing ambitions in artificial intelligence and talent development.
The winners were announced at the official launch of the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre, held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, tying the competition directly to the opening of a new institutional hub for AI research and applied innovation in the Caribbean.
The hackathon focused on automatic speech recognition, a fast expanding field of artificial intelligence that underpins voice assistants, transcription tools and customer support systems. Despite its global reach, speech recognition technology has often struggled with Caribbean accents, limiting its usefulness and reinforcing digital exclusion.
To address that gap, participants trained models using a distinctive dataset of 28,000 manually transcribed audio clips from BBC Caribbean. The aim was to show how locally sourced data, combined with regional talent, can produce AI systems that perform better in specific cultural and linguistic contexts.
More than 40 teams from across the Caribbean took part, a turnout that reflected rising interest in artificial intelligence across the region. The 10 highest ranking teams were invited to pitch real world applications of their models, demonstrating how improved speech recognition could be applied in education, financial services, agriculture and digital communication.
The Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre said it would open source the winning speech recognition models, allowing developers across the Caribbean to build on the work and adapt it to new use cases. The hackathon was supported by partners including CIBC, Infolytics and Data Axis.
“The launch of the AIIC represents a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence in the Caribbean,” said Craig Ramlal, executive director of the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre. “By partnering with Zindi to run this hackathon, we were able to tap into a broader regional community of technologists and apply AI to a problem that directly affects how we as Caribbean people can benefit from AI. This is exactly the kind of applied innovation the AIIC was created to support.”
“This partnership with AIIC shows what’s possible when you combine strong local leadership with a global AI innovation platform,” said Celina Lee, chief executive and co founder of Zindi. “There is no shortage of AI talent in the Caribbean. Our goal at Zindi is to provide the platform, data, and opportunities that allow that talent to shine and to build solutions that are grounded in local realities but have global relevance.”
The initiative reflects Zindi’s expanding footprint beyond Africa and the Middle East and points to the Caribbean’s emergence as a region increasingly visible on the global artificial intelligence map.