Robots are deployed in Africa mainly in manufacturing, yet they may
assist in society as future oriented technologies as well. They may ameliorate, e.g.,
service delivery issues and skills shortages. In this discussion paper, several uses and
use cases relevant to Sub-Saharan Africa are described and requirements identified.
We zoom in on human-robot interaction in Niger-Congo B (‘bantu’) languages. Use
cases for healthcare and education elucidate specific requirements for the natural
language generation component of robots in society. In contrast to typical generation
systems, it demands i) combining data-to-text and knowledge-to-text in one system,
ii) generating different types of sentences so as to switch between written and spoken
language, and iii) processing non-trivial numbers
