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Adenle Built An “African Siri”

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Making a Comeback

Making a Comeback

How Nigerian Tech Genius, Omolabake Adenle Built An “African Siri”

Omolabake Adenle is responsible for inventing a voice recognition and speech synthesis software for African languages. Adenle was born on 1982 in Lagos, Nigeria, where she also grew up. She then sets off to bag a PhD in Information Engineering from Cambridge University.

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After her education, Adenle had a career as a banker, where she works as an investment strategist. But in the course of her being a banker and a software developer, she decided to venture into technology as well. Her role in technology was what brought about an application program interface that can help anyone learn five African languages, including Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Swahili and Rwanda.

How The Big Dream Came to Play

Omolabake Adenle’s invention came to life on a cool afternoon when she was in the living room with her nieces and nephews. She watched them carefully while they played with an English language learning app. She noticed that the app had animated flashcards and it taught each letter in the English alphabet and she thought to herself:

“I think we should have something similar for African Languages”, Adenle then proceeded to make one for Yoruba and she called it SpeakYoruba.

Adenle didn’t stop there. She further developed her invention into something bigger, which attracted so much attention. Adenle went back to her Yoruba learning app and added more intricate features. She added features that require voice recognition and speech synthesis, which can enable anyone to talk to the technology and also get feedback.

But in her inventory process, she discovered that very few African languages were supported in the app. At this point, she had thought to herself that building a platform that supported these features would improve the commercial, economic, and operational value of African languages. So she went right in. Omolabake Adenle ended up building an application platform of speech technologies that facilitates voice automation in African languages. The application supports voice recognition, which means the ability to understand speech. This application also has speech synthesis that can help any user generate synthetic speech in any African language.

She also built some tools that enterprises can use to create voice-activated experiences for their customers. Apart from the five African languages it supports, she is out to digitise more African languages to enable Africans interact with a wide range of devices available in their local languages.

Adenle also founded the AJA.LA Studios, an app development company that specialises in speech technologies for African languages. In 2017, AJA.LA was noticed by Visa for being the first fintech accelerator for African startups and as finalist for the Innovation prize for Africa. In 2018, the studio was also recognised by Spindle for “Best Innovative for Development”.

The Award Winning Invention

In recognition of the importance of Adenle’s inventory, she won an award from Women in Voice, a US-based non-profit. In her words, she said

“It was quite a surprise that I was awarded a diversity in equity and inclusion award by women and voice.”

The award recognised Adenle for her efforts in building speech solutions that contribute to diversity and equity. She believed that Africans are essentially left out of the voice market because most providers do not support African languages. She wanted to make a change and invent something new, which she did.

Above all, Adenle supports women in tech and still encourages more women to create awareness for the tech industry, because they have so much to offer.

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