Omolabake Adenle, a Nigerian woman based in America has received the DEI In Voice Award for her outstanding contribution to technology. She is seeking to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in voice.
This award was presented to her by the Women in Voice (WiV), an international non-profit organization based in Seattle, USA. She is one of the women in Technology on the journey to digitise African languages.
Omolabake Adenle drew everyone’s attention after she built a Voice Recognition and Speech Synthesis software for five African languages. Adenle believes she was selected as one of the other three finalists in this category because she chose to fill the gap for the availability of voice technologies for African languages.
Adenle, Ph.D. in Bayesian Signal Processing, is the founder of Aja.la Studios, a Software Development Studio which she renamed Ajala.ai after it pivoted. She is also an investment strategist and engineer, but of Nigerian-American origin.
As part of her story Dr. Adenle chose not to pursue academia after completing her doctorate programme. Instead she sought investment banking advice.
Doctor was inspired to develop an app (called SpeakYoruba) that could teach the Yoruba language after she saw her cousins who were learning the Alphabets in English language virtually through an app.
SpeakYoruba app was released on the Google Play store in 2010 but is no longer available on the platform. Later, she was asked to do something similar in another language, but was unable to due to her demanding day-to-day work.
SpeakYoruba app was the Doctor’s pivot plan to getting international recognition as she chose not to limit the solution to just the app. There was a bigger vision and she went ahead to build something broader. Adenle pitched the idea to Innovate UK. She then received a grant to go into more research.
In her first year, she used a Technology called Deep Learning, to develop advanced algorithms and acoustic models for speech recognition and synthesis for two African languages. The Company saw the progress she was making and gave her seed fund in 2018.
Siri and Alexa were built using Speech-Recognition technology. The Digital Assistant is able to understand then translate what is said to it into text using this kind of technology. Speech Synthesis only allows the AI to speak back with an articulated voice.
Doctor Adenle planned to build a solution-agnostic platform that will widely support as many African languages as possible. This means that other developers can create local custom solutions without focusing on a specific application. Think of it as an API.
Meanwhile, the solution is still in beta testing and is slated to launch officially in the fourth quarter of 2021. Works with 5 African languages: Yoruba, Hausa, Kiswahili and Kinyarwanda.
In addition to the initial funding, Ajala.ai is working with two major African organisations to develop language solutions for African languages. Dr. Adenle plans to develop more solutions to meet Africa’s unique needs for future launches.
