  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.
