@Linguist_CIOL
APRIL/MAY The Linguist 15
ONLINE INCLUSION
their own when they use their devices. However, to date,
none of the big tech companies, including Google, has
released any work specifically for Nigerian or African
languages. The problem is not a lack of available people
to use these tools. Yorùbá is spoken by over 40 million
people, Hausa by 90 million and Igbo by at least
30 million native speakers, but none has a Siri voice. Yet
Siri exists in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic,
four languages totalling not more than 21 million
speakers combined.
Taking the initiative
In 2016, I created TTSYoruba.com, my first attempt at a
Yorùbá text to speech application, which is also free. It
gives pronunciations for all the names in the Yorùbá
dictionary. Through the Yorùbá Names Project, and by
collaborating with other researchers in the field, I have
tried to find ways to solve the problem as much as
possible. But this has been done using personal funds
and personal commitments, as well as with grants
such as Lacuna Fund (supported by Google.org,
Rockefeller Foundation, IDRC and FairForward) and
Imminent grants.
Masakhane, based in South Africa, is one of several
new initiatives that have taken on the task of creating
NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) solutions across the
continent. Mozilla Common Voice is another. It aims to
crowdsource voices across Africa that researchers can use
to create future speech technologies.
I am now involved in the creation of a new monolingual
dictionary of Yorùbá – online and crowdsourced – similar
to the Yorùbá names dictionary. The project will be at
YorubaWord.com and will be the first Yorùbá dictionary
of its kind with this reach and ambition. The
IgboNames.com project is also underway, a work I
support with a team of Igbo lexicographers interested in
documenting their cultural heritage online.
Reasons for hope
I have read about researchers working on speech tools
for Hausa farmers in the north, and as a member of the
Technical Advisory Panel at Lacuna Fund for 2021-2022,
I help select projects of this nature that deserve to be
supported. What I see today makes me more hopeful
than I was when I started in this field in the early 2000s.
There are certainly more people interested in this space
now, and I hope they succeed.
One of my most recent research collaborations
focused on creating automatic diacritic application
software for Yorùbá words. In future, this will include
tools such as the spell checker, which can help apply
diacritics on Yorùbá texts without the writer having to
necessarily know which marks go where.
These are some of the ways in which technology can
come to be of help both at the individual level and in
the larger scheme of things. The increased ease of
writing leads to the presence of more texts in African
languages on the internet, and – as a consequence –
more speech and technological tools that can empower
more people to get out of poverty, communicate with
others more efficiently, and feel more connected to this
new world of machines.
EVERYDAY USE
Tech initiatives
enabling the accurate
writing of several
African languages
have made it possible
for people in Nigeria
and beyond to use
their languages for
things like commerce
(top) and work (above)
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