The ‘Russian accent’ of Central Asia’s first AI-based digital board member explained

SKAI, a digital board member at Samruk-Kazyna, Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund, faced criticism for pronouncing «tenge,» the national currency, with a Russian accent. Kazakh Deputy Minister of AI and Digital Development Dmitriy Mun attributed this to SKAI’s training on various dialects.

«As for the fact that it currently has some pronunciation errors, I can give an example,» Mun said. «A company created voice assistants—many people know them—and they now speak Kazakh, among other languages. More than 500 people spent over 100 hours speaking different dialects of Kazakh and Russian to achieve what we have today.»

Mun added that SKAI’s pronunciation will continue to improve over time. The ministry is collaborating with the Ministry of Science and the Ministry of Culture to address the issue.

Notably, SKAI’s implementation at Samruk-Kazyna marks only the beginning. The use of such AI systems, the vice minister said, will soon expand to the business sector and public administration.

On Oct. 2, officials announced that the SKAI neural network had been appointed to Samruk-Kazyna’s board of directors as a digital member. The system has voting rights and analyzes internal documents to inform board decisions.