Yarn GPT: Bringing Nigerian Accents & Indigenous Languages to AI with Text-to-Speech!
Artificial Intelligence Takes the World by Storm, but One Nigerian is Changing the Game in Africa
Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm, with tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI pouring billions into AI development to dominate the field. But while all of this is happening, Africa seems to be asleep. One young Nigerian, however, is on a mission to change that.
Meet Saheed Azeez, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Lagos who built Yarn GPT. Yarn GPT is an AI model that can convert text to speech in Nigerian-accented English and native languages. This development has sparked many reactions across social media.
Saheed Azeez created Yarn GPT after realizing that most AI-generated voices sounded natural in Western accents but struggled with African ones. Standard AI models often mispronounce African names and phrases, making them feel unnatural to local users. Yarn GPT was built to address this problem. Designed to read text aloud in a Nigerian accent, it captures the rhythm, tone, and pronunciation unique to Nigerian speech. More than just English, it also supports Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa, making it one of the first AI models tailored to Nigeria's rich linguistic diversity.
To make this possible, Saheed Azeez trained Yarn GPT using audios from Nollywood movies ("Why are you running? Why are you running?"). By combining this with other available data, he was able to create an AI model that could generate clear and authentic speech in Nigerian accents. He built two models: Yarn GPT and Yarn GPT Local. While Yarn GPT focuses on Nigerian English, Yarn GPT Local was created to specialize in reading not just in English but also in Nigeria's major indigenous languages—Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa. This expansion means that more Nigerians can interact with AI in their native languages.
Both models are open-source, which means developers across Africa and beyond can freely access, modify, and improve them. This encourages collaboration, enabling programmers to refine the models to better serve local languages and accents. A developer from Kenya, Ethiopia, or South Africa can take Yarn GPT, tweak it to better suit their own local needs and languages, and contribute to making AI more inclusive for diverse African communities.
However, building an AI model has its challenges, especially in a country like Nigeria. It requires a lot of computing power, and Saheed Azeez didn't have the money to buy expensive GPUs. Instead, he turned to Google Colab, a cloud-based platform that offers free and paid access to GPUs for AI research. It wasn't the most powerful setup, but with determination and resourcefulness, he made it work.
Yarn GPT works by converting text into speech using advanced deep learning techniques. It first breaks down text into simple parts to understand its meaning, then maps the words to Nigerian speech patterns to ensure natural pronunciation. Finally, it generates realistic speech using AI models similar to those used in Google voice assistants. This results in a smooth, natural voice that sounds like a real Nigerian speaker.
Following the success of the original model, Saheed Azeez recently introduced major updates. The first update was making a web interface for Yarn GPT, making it accessible for anyone to try out and provide feedback. The second update was the launch of Yarn GPT 2 and Yarn GPT 2B, two significant upgrades. Yarn GPT 2 was trained on Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and English, integrating both local languages and accented English into a single model. Yarn GPT 2B expands on this with text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities.
Now let's see Yarn GPT in action. Open Yarn GPT and check out how it works. The interface allows users to choose between English, Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa. Users can select voices and click "convert" to generate speech. Once converted, they can listen to the audio output.
Wow! The voice sounds very Nigerian and authentic. If you want to try it out yourself, you can visit Yarn GPT's platform.
Saheed's work has a lot of potential to transform how Africans interact with technology. AI tools have largely been designed for Western users, often struggling with African languages and accents. By creating Yarn GPT, Saheed Azeez is ensuring that Nigerians—and by extension, many Africans—can engage with AI in a way that feels natural and familiar to them.
Beyond accessibility, Yarn GPT’s impact could be economic and cultural. If you are a business, you can integrate it into customer service chatbots. If you run a media house or are a content creator, you can use it for voiceovers. If you are an educator, you can leverage it to teach in native languages.
By keeping this project open-source, Saheed Azeez has set the stage for collaborative innovation, allowing other African developers to build on his work and push AI forward in a uniquely African way.
So, what do you think of Yarn GPT? Try it out! Yarn GPT official Website: https://yarngpt.co/
