Starting in Nigeria, ALVA CORE is building voice AI for African languages. Our first deployment is in banking and telecom customer service, built on real Nigerian speech across Pidgin, regional English, and code-switching.
We believe every African deserves to be understood in their own voice. Not a translated version. Not a simplified version. Their actual voice, with all its regional texture, its code-switching, its emotion, and its identity.
ALVA CORE starts in Nigeria because it is the continent's most linguistically complex market and its largest economy. We are building with Nigerian English and Pidgin first, then Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, before expanding across the continent. The architecture, annotation methodology, and dialogue framework are built to carry any African language.
Every language we add gets the same rigour: real data collection, native speaker validation across dialects and regions, and deep cultural context at every layer. We do not adapt foreign models. We build from the ground up.
One platform. Every language. The voice of a connected Africa.
Commercial speech recognition is trained on Standard American and British English. It fails on Nigerian English, breaks on Pidgin, and collapses entirely when speakers code-switch mid-sentence, which is how most Nigerians actually talk.
Leading global ASR models perform poorly on Nigerian Pidgin and Nigerian English. For regional accents and code-switching, accuracy drops further, making them unusable for high-stakes banking and telecom interactions.
Nigerian speakers shift between English, Pidgin, and indigenous languages within a single sentence. Global ASR treats each as a separate stream. It cannot follow the switch, and misclassifies intent.
Long hold times on bank and telco lines. Automated systems speak only Standard English, excluding the majority of Nigerian customers from self-service options.
Agents mishandle a significant share of intents on fraud alerts, transaction reversals, and account security, carrying real financial and regulatory cost for customers and institutions alike.
ALVA CORE is purpose-built for Nigerian customer service, from the acoustic model to the dialogue engine to the voice output.
Our core IP. A multi-turn conversation engine built for Nigerian banking and telecom workflows, understanding context across turns, handling ambiguity, tracking intent shifts, and managing escalation logic.
ASR built to handle Nigerian English, Pidgin, and intra-sentence code-switching. Trained on real Nigerian speech, not synthetic data or adapted global models.
Classifies banking and telecom intents including check balance, failed transfer, report fraud, buy airtime, and block card, across Nigerian English and Pidgin language varieties.
Real-time detection of caller distress, anger, and potential fraud indicators. Routes high-risk interactions for immediate human review.
Deploys natively to WhatsApp voice notes and traditional IVR phone lines, checking balances, confirming transfers, blocking cards, and buying airtime. Meeting Nigerian customers where they already are.
Responds in natural Nigerian voice that is warm, clear, and culturally authentic. The customer hears a voice they trust, not a robotic American accent.
A focused team with deep domain expertise in Nigerian linguistics, speech AI, and production engineering.
Leads product vision, commercial strategy, and pilot partner relationships. Sources proprietary data partnerships and negotiates licensing agreements across broadcasting, telecom, and financial services.
Designs annotation frameworks, speaker metadata schemas, and linguistic quality standards across all Nigerian language varieties.
Builds and fine-tunes ASR, intent classification, and emotion detection models on Nigerian speech data.
Owns cloud infrastructure, dialogue manager architecture, API integrations, and production deployment pipeline.
We recruit native speakers by dialect and region to annotate, transcribe, and validate training data. Every language variety is verified by speakers from that region, ensuring phonological and semantic accuracy across the full corpus.
As we build voice technology for high-stakes financial interactions, we take data privacy seriously. Security and compliance are not afterthoughts. They are built into every layer of the platform.
Full compliance with Nigeria's Data Protection Regulation. Customer voice data is processed, stored, and handled according to national data protection standards.
We work closely with our partners to ensure all data is anonymised before it enters our training pipeline. No personally identifiable or sensitive information is retained. If data does not meet NDPR standards, it does not enter our corpus.
For partners with strict data residency requirements, ALVA CORE can be deployed on-premise within the organisation's own infrastructure.
We are looking for pilot partners in banking and telecom, strategic advisors, and investors who believe in African language technology.
hello@alvacoreai.com →