The African continent lacks enough qualified teachers which hampers the provision of adequate learning support. An AI could potentially augment the efforts of the limited number of teachers, leading to better learning outcomes. Towards that end, this work describes and evaluates the first key output for the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, which proposes a robust, real-world benchmark for such an AI: "Build an AI to compete live in Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) competition and win - performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition". The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. In this work, we built Brilla AI, an AI contestant that we deployed to unofficially compete remotely and live in the Riddles round of the 2023 NSMQ Grand Finale, the first of its kind in the 30-year history of the competition. Brilla AI is currently available as a web app that livestreams the Riddles round of the contest, and runs 4 machine learning systems: (1) speech to text (2) question extraction (3) question answering and (4) text to speech that work together in real-time to quickly and accurately provide an answer, and then say it with a Ghanaian accent. In its debut, our AI answered one of the 4 riddles ahead of the 3 human contesting teams, unofficially placing second (tied). Improvements and extensions of this AI could potentially be deployed to offer science tutoring to students and eventually enable millions across Africa to have one-on-one learning interactions, democratizing science education.

翻译：非洲大陆缺乏足够的合格教师，这阻碍了充分学习支持的提供。人工智能有可能增强有限教师力量，带来更好的学习成果。为此，本研究描述并评估了NSMQ AI大挑战赛的第一个关键输出，该挑战赛为这种AI提出了一个稳健的现实世界基准："构建一个AI，在加纳全国科学与数学竞赛（NSMQ）中实时参赛并获胜——在所有轮次和阶段的表现均优于最佳参赛者"。NSMQ是一项面向加纳高中生的年度现场科学与数学竞赛，由3支各含2名学生的队伍参赛，在生物学、化学、物理学和数学领域进行5轮渐进式阶段的问答，直到产生年度冠军队伍。在本研究中，我们构建了Brilla AI，这是一个AI参赛者，我们将其部署到2023年NSMQ总决赛的谜题轮中，以非官方方式远程实时参赛，这是该竞赛30年历史上的首次。Brilla AI目前以网络应用形式运行，直播竞赛的谜题轮，并运行四个机器学习系统：（1）语音转文本、（2）问题提取、（3）问题回答和（4）文本转语音，这些系统实时协同工作，快速准确地提供答案，并以加纳口音说出。在首次亮相中，我们的AI在四个谜题中比三支人类参赛队伍更快回答了一个，非官方排名并列第二。该AI的改进和扩展未来可用于为学生提供科学辅导，最终使数百万非洲人能够进行一对一学习互动，推动科学教育的普及。