TheCable

Omolabake Adenle, founder of the ‘SpeakYoruba’ app, has been recognised for her innovation in building natural language and speech processing applications for under-resourced languages in Africa. 

Women in Voice (WIV), a US-based non-profit, has awarded its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in voice award to Adenle.

The Nigerian-American financial analyst surpassed three other finalists to win the award which celebrates and amplifies women and gender diversity in voice technology.

She was recognised for her outstanding contributions to “making African languages accessible to voice solutions”.

The Ph.D. holder in Bayesian Signal Processing from Cambridge University is the founder/chief executive officer of Aja.La Studios, which builds natural language and speech processing applications for under-resourced languages.

Expressing her gratitude for the WiV award, Adenle said it will help “contribute to the momentum needed to work towards making voice technologies accessible to all Africans”.

She added that “building a speech technology company that provides broad support of African languages is extremely challenging, (but) voice technologies will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of information and service access in Africa”.

Adenle added that by digitising African languages, information will be more accessible to Africans.