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Project Gecko

News & features

Three white line icons on a blue‑to‑purple gradient background: a vertical audio waveform on the left, a globe showing Africa and Europe in the center, and a network on the right.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Mercy Muchai, Kevin Chege, Nick Mumero, and Stephanie Nyairo

Microsoft Research unveils Paza, a human-centered speech pipeline, and PazaBench, the first leaderboard for low-resource languages. It covers 39 African languages and 52 models and is tested with communities in real settings.

Three white icons on a blue-to-purple gradient background: the first icon shows an image/photo; the second icon depicts a computer monitor with vertical bars; the third icon displays three connected circles with user silhouettes.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Akshay Nambi, Kavyansh Chourasia, and Tanuja Ganu

MMCTAgent enables dynamic multimodal reasoning with iterative planning and reflection. Built on Microsoft’s AutoGen framework, it integrates language, vision, and temporal understanding for complex tasks like long video and image analysis.

a field of green plants with two people walking in between the rows

In the news | Microsoft Research Story

AI tools can perform poorly in non-Western languages and lack critical cultural context for many populations. Project Gecko uses small language models to bring vital expertise to farmers in underserved areas using local languages and multi-modal content.