Most speech data is read aloud
Someone sits with a script and reads prompts into a mic. Clean, fast, and nothing like the way people actually talk.
Speech AI that understands Nigerian English
Built on our own data, recorded across Nigeria.
Backed by the TY Danjuma Family Office
Nobody else has this.
We didn't scrape it off the internet. We went out and recorded it. Every hour is consented, paid for, and checked by somebody who actually speaks the language.
Anybody can build a model. Nobody can go back and record the last three years.
1,400 hrs
Recorded speech
Studio and field, across the country.
3,200
Distinct speakers
No speaker recorded twice under two names.
24
States covered
Out of 36, plus the FCT.
18
Accents and varieties
Tagged per clip, not per session.
The languages we cover, and the ones we are going after
Collected
Nigerian English
The language of the courts, the classroom and the news. It has its own vowels and its own rhythm, and no model trained on London or Los Angeles has heard them.
60–100M
Speakers
Almost all second language. Estimates vary by how you count fluency.
37
States and the FCT
Official everywhere. What changes by state is accent, not presence.
820 hrs
Recorded so far
Consented, paid for, and checked by a person.
Collected
Nigerian Pidgin
Naijá
Spoken everywhere, native here. Pidgin learned first sounds nothing like Pidgin spoken over Yorùbá or Hausa, and the difference shows up in the audio.
75–120M
Speakers
The widest spread of any language here, and the widest disagreement on the number.
6
States in the heartland
Where it is a first language rather than a second one.
580 hrs
Recorded so far
Weighted toward first language speakers on purpose.
Next
Yorùbá
Èdè Yorùbá
Tone carries meaning, not mood. Get the marks wrong and you have written a different word. Most speech pipelines drop them entirely.
40–45M
Speakers
Plus millions more across Kwara and Kogi in the North Central.
6
States in the zone
Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti.
Planned
Collection
Not started. We would rather say that than pad a number.
Next
Hausa
Count second language speakers and it is the biggest language in the country. It runs trade and radio across the whole north.
50–55M
First language speakers
Over 80M once you count it as a second language.
7
States in the zone
Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Kaduna, Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi.
Planned
Collection
Not started.
Next
Igbo
Asụsụ Igbo
Tonal, heavily dialectal, and written with marks most speech tools quietly throw away. Anambra and Abia do not sound alike.
25–35M
Speakers
Plus Anioma, Ika and Ukwuani Igbo across the Niger in Delta.
5
States in the zone
Anambra, Imo, Enugu, Abia, Ebonyi.
Planned
Collection
Not started.
Nigerian English, Every zone
What we build with it
Getting the recordings is the hard part. These are the things they make possible.
People don't speak the way they read
Most speech data is somebody reading prompts out loud. Ours is people talking. That difference is the whole product.
People don't talk like they read
Reading evens out the pace, drops the fillers, and never switches from English to Pidgin halfway through a sentence.
We record real conversations
People talking to each other, in the places they would be talking anyway, with the noise that comes with it.
So it sounds like your users
Everyday African speech, in the languages and the registers it actually happens in.
The models we're building
Three of them, all trained on the same corpus. Pick one to see what it does.
Transcription you can build on. Subtitles, meeting records, anything that has to be searchable after the fact.
Generated audio in a voice your customers already recognise, rather than one imported from somewhere else.
End to end conversation. Somebody speaks, the thing answers, and nothing has to be written down in between.
Speech to text
Transcription you can build on. Subtitles, meeting records, anything that has to be searchable after the fact.
ASR, Speech to text. Transcription you can build on. Subtitles, meeting records, anything that has to be searchable after the fact.
FAQ
The ones that come up on nearly every call. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin are collected and in use. Yorùbá, Hausa and Igbo are next, in that order. If you need one that is not on the list, that is a conversation worth having.
We record it ourselves, across Nigeria. Every hour is consented, paid for, and checked by somebody who speaks the language. Nothing here was scraped.
Yes. Licensed hours, labelled clip by clip rather than batch by batch, with provenance you can put in front of a regulator.
That is a service we run. Your vocabulary, your customers' accents, recorded to a brief you write with us.
We scope it, run a pilot on your own domain data, then deploy. You see the numbers on your traffic before anybody signs anything long term.
Yes, and you get paid for it. Bring your voice, your accent and an hour of your time.