From the Ground Up: Building a Voice Startup in Frontier Markets

Track: Multilingual AI | C3 |
Tuesday, March 8, 2022, 4:30am – 5:15am
Held in: Jujama
Presenter:
Abake Adenle - ajala

In this session we will discuss the challenges involved in building an enterprise speech technology company that offers broad coverage of African languages. African languages are largely underserved by commercial speech technology providers and product market fit remains elusive at scale. Furthermore, data resources and limited academic research on training machine learning models for African languages present challenges to product development. We will highlight the importance of resource efficiency in delivering voice solutions in developing economies, building an ethical data collection operation in nine African countries, and managing challenges of partnering with large pan-African enterprises.