UNICEF WCARO NLP Landscape

West and Central Africa Language Technology
Last updated: 2026-04-23
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Lyngual Labs

Startup early

Organization Information

Startup
2024
small
early
open
Nigeria
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LyngualLabs

Coverage

Nigeria

Description

Nigerian AI research lab building speech and NLP models for Nigerian languages, with a focus on Yoruba. Operates under LynguaTech Innovative Foundation. Has created paid opportunities for 500+ voice contributors and built a community of 289 data annotators. Notable work on Yoruba-English code-switched ASR, TTS accessibility evaluation for visually impaired learners, and multimodal LLM evaluation on Nigerian exam content (WAEC/NECO).

🦄 UNICEF Relevance

Education accessibility for visually impaired learners using TTS in local languages. Code-switched speech recognition addresses real-world Nigerian speech patterns. Open models on HuggingFace for Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa — all UNICEF priority languages.

Key People

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Last updated: 2026-03-31