AI Summit: AI serving African languages
Leroy Abiguime speaks on the place of African languages in tomorrow's models.
About
For tomorrow's Africa
Umbaji started from a simple observation: the most advanced technology ignores languages spoken by tens of millions of Africans every day. We build the tools that fix that.
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Our story
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Umbaji is a Togolese company that started by democratizing access to AI and robotics, integrating robots like Pepper, Niryo One, and NAO for businesses and institutions across West Africa, and showcasing that work internationally, including at the Dubai World Expo.
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That fieldwork surfaced a deeper problem: nearly every voice AI model ignores African languages for lack of available data. Umbaji shifted focus to building that data, with the communities who speak these languages, Ewe and Kabiyè first.
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That work led to Yodi, our voice AI model, and then to a full ecosystem: a community data collection platform, and a scientific benchmark to objectively measure progress.
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What guides our choices
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Speakers first
No data trains a model without native speaker validation, and no accepted contribution is used without being paid.
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Proof before promise
Our results are measured by a public metric, the Lom score, and documented in verifiable scientific publications.
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Africa building for Africa
Our partnerships with Togo AI Lab, universities, and governments ground every model in a real, local use case.
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Restraint and real impact
We favor tools that are useful day to day over spectacular tech demos with no concrete use.
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The team
Umbaji is run by a Togolese team of AI researchers, engineers, and linguists, founded by Justin Bakoubolo. We regularly recruit in robotics, cloud engineering, project management, and design, for internships, contracts, or volunteering.
See open roles
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Join the community
Umbaji is built with native speakers, researchers, institutions, and companies. Here's how to get involved, whatever your background.
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Our activities
From robotics to voice AI, a few milestones that tell our story.
Umbaji at SIPEN-UEMOA, Lomé
Yodi demoed across the international digital business fair.
Togo Data Lab Masterclass
Free community masterclass on Transformer architecture and its mathematical foundations.
YodiV3 and the Eyaa-Tom dataset published
AfricaNLP presentation of the Lom metric and the multi-domain corpus covering twelve Togolese languages.
Togo AI Lab and Zindi partnership
Joint development of understanding and translation models for Togolese national languages.
Regional expansion: Ghana, Benin, Nigeria
Collaborations to broaden Yodi's language coverage beyond Togo.
Umbaji at Automatica
Presence at the international robotics and automation trade fair, from Umbaji's early robotics years.
Umbaji at the Dubai World Expo 2020
Umbaji's robotics and technology democratization work presented on the international stage.