Techzim

Zimbabwe and regional technology news and updates


Why Cybersecurity Is Vital For A Driverless Future

Driverless cars are, without a doubt, the future of mobility. They will help us unlock potential in the auto as well as transportation industries.  Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) has been tested in other industries and has shown great potential in making the world a better, more functional place and because autonomous vehicles are built […]


Google Assistant Coming To Feature Phones

Google recently announced that its Assistant service will be made available to phones that don’t access the internet through a call centre. The interesting service is being rolled out in India first and will be free for callers. Google said callers will be able to; Get traffic updates, check scores and locate businesses around them […]


Econet Partners American Startup For AI And ML Solutions

The Econet Global Group has announced from Accra Ghana their partnership with American startup, Atlas AI. The announcement was made by Econet’s Founder and Executive Chairman, Strive Masiyiwa on the sidelines of the Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF). It is not very clear what the two partners will really embark on or how their partnership […]


China Now Has a Robot Traffic Police Force

China has taken its expertise in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence to the next level by deploying traffic robots in the real world. Those living in Northern China would probably be caught by robots for overspeeding on the roads next time. These traffic robots are made possible by the combined application of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, […]


Algorithms That Detect Hate Speech On Social Media Could Be Biased Against Black People

What happens when Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t so ethical? These are questions that have been asked before but we haven’t necessarily had to answer those questions until now… Two recent studies have shown that AI trained to identify hate-speech contains racial biases. One study showed that leading AI models used to process hate speech are […]


Local “Artificial Intelligence For Business” Course To Be Held In September

Information technology and software services company Softclick Investments is hosting an Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Business course from the 24th of September to 26 October at Batanai Gardens. The course is supposed to provide “practical, comprehensive training that enables participants to immediately and effectively partake in enterprise AI projects.” Who is the course for? The […]


Innovative Deep Learning Solution For Face Detection Developed By AI Company Sightcorp

Amsterdam, Netherlands – August 7, 2019 – AI-powered software company Sightcorp has managed to creatively iterate and improve the detection aspect of facial analysis and recognition software, thanks to their unique focus on deep learning, rather than the classical Haar Cascade detector methodology. This comes on the heels of an effort on the part of […]


CashBot Promises To Save You As Much As 62% On EcoCash Charges

If you go to the Google Play Store and search for CashBot you’ll be met with a pretty humble description that doesn’t fully explain the impact of this application. The store description reads: The CashBot app allows you to save money when transacting on Mobile Money in Zimbabwe. Our algorithms find the optimum amounts you […]


African Data Science Platform Hosting US$8 000 Competition In Partnership With Microsoft

We’ve written about Zindi before, the platform puts up AI/Data science problems that they pay African’s for solving. It’s quite the platform and if you’re an AI professional (or fanatic), it’s something you need to closely follow. The platform has partnered with Microsoft and Wazihub to advance the use of tech for agricultural resilience and […]


Users Training WeChat’s Image Recognition System Without Knowing

Some research published has brought to light the fact that WeChat users are unknowingly contributing to a database of blacklisted images as part of Chinese efforts to censor the internet. Due to the fact that Chinese companies have to monitor content on their platforms to avoid getting in the government’s bad books, once you consider […]


Zimbabwean, William Sachiti Launches Kar-go, Europe’s First Roadworthy Driverless Delivery Car

We have talked about Pasi William Sachiti a few time in the past. We have been impressed by his UK startup, Academy of Robotics which has been working on Kar-go, a driverless car to solve the last mile delivery problem. The last time we talked about Sachiti and Kar-go, he had just successfully raised funding […]


Zimbabwe Team Wins Gold At Robotics World Olympics

The Zimbabwe robotics team currently in Ghana at the Robotics Olympics clinched a gold medal yesterday. We don’t have much details of the competition at the moment except that the team won the gold and the USA team won silver. Here are a few pics: Quick NetOne, Econet, And Telecel Airtime Recharge Number to recharge: […]


Strive Masiyiwa’s Dismissive Language On The Impact Of AI Is Reckless

I must first point out that I don’t think Strive Masiyiwa literally meant that the issue of AI changing the jobs market significantly is nonsense. However, he wrote it that way, most probably in an attempt to make his language colourful. That is the point though: a person in as influential a position as he […]


Besides Masiyiwa, Mark Zuckerberg Recently Discussed The Impact Of AI Too. WATCH

Strive Masiyiwa recently discussed the impact of artificial intelligence in the world today and the future. He sounded quite optimistic about this transition. We were reminded of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent video discussing AI and other tech trends right now in respect of global economies and society in general. He was discussing with author and historian […]


Strive Masiyiwa Says Don’t Listen To Nonsense About AI Taking People’s Jobs

You may know of a popular fella by the name Strive Masiyiwa, he’s done some pretty significant things in telecoms both inside and out of Zimbabwe. Recently, Mr Masiyiwa took to his Facebook and reflected on the impact that software and subsequently programming and AI have had on our lives over the past few years. […]


AI Expo Africa Launches Grand AI Art Challenge

In recent years, art-creating AI has pushed the boundaries of how we define art. This Grand AI Art competition challenges the African AI & Data Science community on Zindi to create original artwork and music track(s) using artificial intelligence (AI).  The challenge is to create an original piece of artwork or music that leverages AI. […]


Women In Tech, Apply For The WeAllFit Tech Scholarship

Akademy.AI isnt too pleased. Why? Well, only 22% of the world’s AI professionals are women, and they profoundly dislike this statistic and have decided to do something. That’s why they have opted to offer a full scholarship for their 10 week AI Engineer Bootcamp. The AI Engineer Bootcamp is an intensive, full-time experience where you […]


Microsoft To Build Development Centres In Africa Over The Next 5 Years

Microsoft has shared their plans to construct development centres at a cost of more than 100 million in the next half-decade. The development centres in Africa are supposed to work with Microsoft’s local partners and government. Microsoft also hopes to hire engineers from these centres. The initial sites for the development centres will be in […]


Cyclone Idai Reflection: Data Science In Disaster Preparation And Relief

Hi! My name is Njabulo Sandawana and am the founder of Ant Analytica. Ant Analytica is a Big Data Analytics startup based in Harare. At Ant Analytica we leverage data science and Analytics to help companies build automated solutions and provide insights that lead to sustainable growth. The recent disaster that occured in the Eastern […]


AI Ventures Into Wildlife, Some Fascinating Stories

Artificial Intelligence (AI) when combined with any existing form of technology, amplifies the entire experience and performance of the same. Keeping this in mind, scientists are integrating AI in various industries. With its widespread use in almost every arena today, it has also trickled its way into a sector that can help revolutionise the ecosystem […]


Standard Bank Closing 91 Branches, The Robots Are Here To Take Our Jobs!

Dramatic title aside, automation has been a very touchy subject over the past few years and recent developments at Standard Bank SA won’t do anything to halt people’s animosity towards the digital transition the world is going through right now. The bank has announced that they will be closing off 91 branches and this is […]


How Dubai Is Utilising AI For Police Work: Predictive Policing

For most of us, computerised law enforcement sounds like something of dystopian sci-fi. With technology advancement, many of the law enforcement agencies are already using algorithms to fight crime. A set of algorithms are designed to figure out where and when the crimes are likely to happen. This is called Predictive Policing. Preventing crime often […]


Google Translate Is Getting Much Better At Translating Shona

Most of Google’s technologies have always been awesome but if you speak a language that’s not as popular as the likes of French, Spanish, Hindi and a bunch of other “significant” languages then you may feel a tad bit left out. We’ve all seen hilarious translations of English to Shona on Google and apart from […]


The Potential Of Artificial Intelligence In The Retail Market

With the advancement of scientific technologies, we have come across a various scientific contribution in recent times. This scientific approach has surely influenced human nature and with recent studies show that the decisions we make are influenced by the technology around us. A strong example of this is the retail industry and the latest integration of […]


AI Can Have A Dark Side Too: Heard Of Deepfake Videos?

When people think of harmful Artificial Intelligence, we usually think of the Rise of the Machines revolutions where robots get so intelligent they take over everything. The honest truth is there are many other ways AI can be harmful and if you’ve heard about Deepfakes then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. What are […]


How Crazy? China Is Installing Facial Recognition Toilet-Paper-Dispensers To Cut Toilet Paper Wastage In Public Toilets

China has a problem with, of all things, toilet paper. Citizens have been caught using too much of it or just downright stealing them straight out of public restrooms. Guess what’s the Chinese government’s controlling measure? The Chinese government installed facial recognition toilet paper dispensers. Toilet users will need to scan their faces for dispensers to issue […]


Techzim Concluded The Google Home Was Useless In Zimbabwe But My Wife Found Use For It

So a few months back we bought the Google Home, you know the speaker that uses the Google Assistant to play music and control stuff in your home if you happen to have a connected home, We bought it just to get a feel of the smart speaker. Google or Amazon I remember my colleague […]


Zimnat’s New Customer Care Chatbot Makes It Way Easier To Inquire About Insurance Premiums

It’s not something you see every day when traditional companies start to use fashionable technologies. Zimnat is one such traditional company that is fast wearing the new clothes of emerging technologies. Zimnat has been one of the leading players in life assurance and short-term insurance sector since 1946 in Zimbabwe. And lately, it has been […]


[Updated] Are We Having A Bot Revolution In Zim? Here’s A List Of Some Of The Cool Chatbots We’ve Come Across

The AI revolution isn’t playing a big role yet in Zim but we are starting to see artificial intelligence get used and there have been a few chatbots (as we learned at WordCamp Harare last week) being deployed locally and let’s take a look at some of these bots and what they do… Batsi Steward […]


HIT To Host First PyData Zim Meetup In Hopes Of Creating A Data Science Community

PyData Harare is partnering with Data Science Zimbabwe, Harare Institute of Technology (HIT) and Pycon Zim to hold their first meetup on the 8th of December. The PyData meetup is probably going to be quite interesting if you are interested in Python, data science or machine learning. Best of all it’s a free meetup so […]