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，这阻碍了学习支持的充分提供。人工智能有望增强有限教师的力量，从而改善学习成效。为此，本文描述并评估了NSMQ人工智能大挑战（NSMQ AI Grand Challenge）的首个关键成果——该挑战提出了一个稳健、真实世界的基准测试，要求构建一个能在加纳国家科学数学竞赛（NSMQ）中实时参赛并获胜的人工智能，在所有轮次和阶段中表现优于最佳参赛者。NSMQ是加纳高中生年度现场科学数学竞赛，由3支各含2名学生的队伍参加，在五个渐进阶段的五轮比赛中回答生物学、化学、物理学和数学问题，直至决出年度冠军。本研究中，我们构建了Brilla AI——一个人工智能参赛者，并将其部署于2023年NSMQ总决赛的“谜题”轮次中进行非官方远程实时参赛，这在竞赛30年历史上尚属首次。Brilla AI目前以网页应用形式呈现，可直播谜题轮次比赛，并运行四个机器学习系统：(1)语音转文字、(2)问题提取、(3)问答系统及(4)文字转语音，这些系统协同实时运作，以快速准确提供答案，并以加纳口音朗读。在首次亮相中，我们的人工智能在四个谜题中的一个上领先于三支人类参赛队伍，非官方排名并列第二。该人工智能的改进与扩展未来可部署于科学辅导，最终使数百万非洲人获得一对一的学习互动，推动科学教育民主化。