ITWeb TV: Lelapa AI eyes faster, ambitious growth
The local AI start-up looks to expand its language base outside of Africa, says co-founder Pelonomi Moiloa.
Lelapa AI, an artificial intelligence research and product lab co-founded by Pelonomi Moiloa, is aiming to accelerate its growth and broaden its scope. The company is focused on enhancing its product line with text-to-speech capabilities and expanding its language capabilities beyond African languages. During an interview with ITWeb TV, Moiloa highlighted the challenges of collecting data in African languages due to costs and resource limitations.
Lelapa AI's live application programming interface (API), Vulavula, currently translates multilingual call centre conversations into structured text for analytics, quality assurance, and compliance systems. The CEO expressed excitement about introducing text-to-speech functionality, enabling devices to generate voice output in vernacular languages.
Lelapa AI's goal is to bridge the gap between digital products and services, providing language infrastructure for enterprises with multilingual communication needs. The company has achieved 60% less compute and data requirements for building language models compared to conventional methods, showcasing potential for other industries to develop language-specific technologies more easily.
Moiloa emphasized the importance of viewing AI as a tool to implement specific solutions rather than relying on pre-existing models to solve problems.
Written by urgent.news from ITWeb's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
