South African startup Aweza in partnership with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) elite Human Language Technology Research team have launched a medical text-to-speech pilot dubbed AwezaMed.
Awezamed is a build up on their original Aweza app, which was developed in 2014 to help South Africans overcome language barriers.
Aweza has since been redeveloped with the medical sector as its point of focus. It allows doctors and medical staff to easily communicate with patients in their own language, thus reducing the language barrier that causes misunderstandings and misdiagnoses. Each of the 1,800 medical phrases and questions are translated into three national languages, and synthesized into audio using the CSIR’s text-to-speech engine.
The startup’s founder and lead developer, Glenn Stein said, “Aweza and I have come a long way since 2014, with a lot of hard lessons learnt and personal sacrifices made along the way.” Glenn continues, “I rebuilt the app from scratch; it’s easier to use and a lot more stable, as technology has improved dramatically in the past four years. I’ve dreamt of building a language-translation app in the medical space since I first started working on Aweza – an app that reduces misunderstandings in the medical sector caused by language barriers. Aweza has now come into its own.”
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The teams will pilot the app in 10 rural and urban public clinics and hospitals across South Africa. The trial will make the app available to doctors and medical staff, either via tablets provided or their own mobile devices.
While the AwezaMed pilot and the development of the CSIR’s speech technology pipeline was funded by the Department of Arts and Culture, the app redevelopment was funded by Aweza itself, which is now running a crowdfunding initiative to raise funds for the next phase of development and to launch an Android app.
The next project, AwezaEd, is also underway. A sister project to AwezaMed, AwezaEd is being built in partnership with FastAcademy’s FastMaths, which was initially funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. The focus is again on addressing language barriers, but this time within the education system.
