Afluence VoicePilot

Ten languages account for about 80 percent of global internet usage; none of them are African languages. With many people interacting with their devices via natural interfaces like voice, it is unfortunate that no digital voice assistant supports African languages. This is even more surprising when one considers the $2 trillion in spending power that Africans contribute annually.  The HUGE lack of inclusion in the design, development, and commercialization of impactful technologies overlooks many developing nations and creates a significant barrier for the citizens to benefit from the transformational impact of these technologies.  

At Afluence, we are building an interactive voice platform and our first product will enable enterprises to provide voice assistants that will support African languages to start. With our solution, we will help global businesses increase their reach and offer their services to people within these communities, thereby making them active participants in the global digital economy

Ten languages account for about 80 percent of global internet usage; none of them are African languages. With many people interacting with their devices via natural interfaces like voice, it is unfortunate that no digital voice assistant supports African languages. This is even more surprising when one considers the $2 trillion in spending power that Africans contribute annually. 

Accounting for the 250 million that speak English in Africa, this means that over 700 million Africans are being overlooked in the digital revolution. Furthermore, this means that businesses and services are missing out on many opportunities. Africa is currently the fastest-growing mobile telecom market in the world, averaging roughly 30 percent increase in mobile phone connections per year since 2000, and recently overtaking Latin America to become the world’s second-largest mobile market behind Asia (Deloitte 2013).  

At Afluence, we are building an interactive voice platform and our first product is an enterprise voice assistant that will recognize various African dialects and languages. With our solution, we will help global businesses increase their reach and offer their services to people within these communities, thereby making them active participants in the global digital economy.

Afluence provides a voice command recognition API as a service that businesses can use to create digital assistants or voice interfaces for interacting with their clients in popular languages widely spoken in developing nations. 

Our voice command recognition API is built using deep learning algorithms and other state of the art natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence techniques.

We believe our solution would serve those in developing communities where digital literacy is underdeveloped or non-existent

Afluence's solution will focus on the Yoruba language to start before venturing into other languages within Nigeria, Africa, and other developing nations around the world. The Yoruba language speaking community of South-West Nigeria is one that fits our criteria and is the initial language we would be supporting on our platform. While a lot of people in this community have access to phones, many of them do not communicate in English and thus have a difficult time in taking full advantage of the features on the phone such as internet browsing and mobile app usage. Our voice interface would make it easier for them to navigate their phones and other devices thus enabling them to fully utilize their devices to improve their lives.

For enterprises, Afluence is increasing their reach and eliminate significant language barrier unlocking opportunities for cross-border trade and travel. 

The most natural way for humans to communicate is via speech and voice.  Building voice interfaces to enable quick access to relevant information in any language will be critical in making it easier to unlock the potential that technology provides as well as improving the way of life. Our solution to this problem equips everyone to be more digitally literate regardless of gender, language, location and other factors.

We are in the pilot stage. After showcasing a rough prototype of the voice command recognition API service to some potential enterprise clients, we garnered significant interest from one enterprise client and our MVP is currently in development.  

Afluence solution is innovative as it addresses a much overlooked segment when new technologies are introduced. Our solution utilizes deep learning as well as NLP and AI techniques to address low-resource languages. 

We are still in prototype stage, so we don't currently serve any customers. 

Joining Solve to learn from an amazing community as we build the business. We also plan to be contributors and will help foster this community, if we are selected.