- Safiu Kehinde
A final year Mechanical Engineering student of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Saheed Azeez, has built a Nigerian accented text-to-speech model.
The Artificial Intelligence powered model called, YarnGPT, accommodated all the nuances and complexities of Nigerian languages as it read out text in clear Nigerian accents.
This was disclosed in a post shared on UNILAG’s official X handle on Friday.
Speaking on how he came up with the innovation in an exclusive interview, Azeez recounted how absence of African language-inspired text-to-speech model and a failed interview with a tech company had inspired him to build the model.
“I have seen many text-to-speech systems with no support for African languages and I have also seen some other text-to-speech models that work with other accents.
“I, therefore, just wanted to build something like that for Nigerian use. Also, I interviewed for a tech company that built something around that and I didn’t do well in the interview. That spurred me to build this.
“Basically, I developed a text-to-speech model. While there are numerous text-to-speech models available, what sets this one apart is its foundation on Nigerian data, making it compatible with Nigerian accents and languages.
“Typical text-to-speech models generate speech with European or American accents. However, the uniqueness of this model lies in its ability to produce clear, Nigerian-accented English.” He said.
The 400-level student further disclosed that his love for robotics spurred from his secondary school days which motivated him to study Mechanical Engineering in order to pursue his dream.
“I am a final-year student of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Lagos (UNILAG).
“Since my days in junior secondary school, I’ve always been interested in robotics and how things work.
“So when it was time for me to write JAMB and pick a course of study, I had the option of selecting from Mechanical, Computer, Electrical, or Systems Engineering, and because I didn’t have anybody around me who studied Mechanical Engineering, I decided to go with that.
“I was also interested in building robots. I had thought that Mechanical Engineering would teach me how to build robots someday.
“So my journey into tech really started when I entered school as a Mechanical Engineering student. I carried out research on how to stand out in the field of Mechanical Engineering. I found out that one had to learn programming and one of the top programming languages that related better with Mechanical Engineering was Python.
“So in my first year, I started learning Python. I joined a programme organized by Data Science School (DSC) UNILAG in 2019. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself learning more about Python and then I got into machine learning.
“From that moment onward till now, I’ve been consistently involved in building projects.” He said.
On the challenges faced during the project, Azeez identified gathering data on Nigerian version of English and funding as his major challenges.
“I think the major issue with getting the data was learning about and using some new libraries I haven’t used before to get the data.
“Another issue with the quality of the data I gathered from the libraries were not as good as I would have wanted. While it worked, the data quality could have been better because I got data from various movies. For example, the quality of movie A might be different from the quality of movie B.
“The way movie A is transcribed would be different from the way movie B was transcribed.
“Another challenge I faced was actually building the project, because I’d have to pay for Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and well, funding in general.” He added.