Unkad Labs
Unkad — Somali for creation from nothing.
Unkad Labs is a non-profit AI research laboratory building the Somali language into the age of artificial intelligence. We create open datasets through community contribution, and we research how to evaluate and align AI systems for Somali and other low-resource languages — making the language richer, and the systems that speak it safer.
WhySomali is spoken by more than 20 million people. Yet the infrastructure AI needs — clean text, annotated data, benchmarks, safety evaluations — mostly does not exist for it. What data there is runs scarce and noisy, and dialects such as Maay are nearly absent altogether.
There is also no systematic way to measure whether AI is safe and accurate in Somali. A model can fail quietly — mistranslating a medical instruction, complying with a request it would refuse in English — and no benchmark exists to catch it.
AI is becoming the gateway to information and services. Without deliberate work, Somali speakers risk being left out, or served by systems that fail them in ways no one is measuring. We are not documenting infrastructure that exists. We are creating it from nothing.
What we doData — The Unkad Platform
An open platform where Somali speakers write, record, and validate language data across sectors and dialects. Everything is released openly. Cell by cell.
Safety & Alignment Research
Benchmarks, safety test sets, and red-teaming methodology for Somali — built so the methods transfer to every language in the same position.
We publish everything openly — on GitHub and Hugging Face.