Omolabake Adenle is a 35-year-old Nigerian who founded Aja.la Studios, a company that builds natural language & speech processing applications for African languages.
She holds a PhD in Bayesian Signal Processing from Cambridge University where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Tau Beta Pi Honors Fellow.
She had been shortlisted for the Innovation Prize for Africa for her voice recognition and speech synthesis software for African languages, a software that can understand and digitize spoken African languages.
Her software will not only help newer generations learn languages that are slowly dying, but will also afford those who speak only their local languages enjoy the benefits of the digital revolution – just imagine a voice assistant (Siri, Google Now) that can take instructions in and speak Yoruba.
Omolabake Adenle’s Aja.la Studios has already built SpeakYoruba, a Yoruba Language learning app (think Duolingo), and is looking to build more learning apps for African Languages under its SpeakAfricaApps project
While voice recognition and speech synthesis software have been developed for various Western and Asian languages, there has been very limited commercial application or academic research for African languages.
This innovation will open up opportunities for Africans with low literacy levels – or those that simply don’t speak English – to also enjoy the benefits of the digital revolution.