Multilingual Tool Calling in 70+ Languages, On Device

Cohere Labs has unveiled Tiny Aya, a tool that demonstrates significant potential in multilingual tool calling, accommodating over 70 languages, including low-resource languages like Swahili and Luganda. Despite not being explicitly trained for tool calling, Tiny Aya excelled in instruction following, particularly with the Hermes tool calling method, achieving a high success rate in structured function calls. The Tiny Aya Expedition evaluated four model variants across 53 languages, revealing that TinyAya-Earth, with 3.35 billion parameters and no tool-call training, outperformed larger models trained specifically for tool calling in languages like Luganda and Swahili. A key finding was that 4-bit quantization outperformed fp16, making it ideal for mobile deployment. The TinyFacade initiative allows Tiny Aya to run as an Android service without cloud dependency, supporting easy integration with applications. This development aims to make tool calling accessible on mobile devices, reducing the need for large apps and promoting scalability. Cohere Labs is open to collaboration to further enhance this project, which promises to broaden accessibility and usability for diverse languages and applications.